<<

HARVARD ARCHIVE

SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER 2019 2 DJIBRIL DIOP MAMBÉTY’S CINEMA OF POSSIBILITY DJIBRIL DIOP MAMBÉTY’S september 6 – september 9 CINEMA OF POSSIBILITY 4 WEEKEND MATINEE SEPTEMBER 6 – SEPTEMBER 9 september 7 – november 16 6 THE B-FILM. LOW-BUDGET CINEMA 1935 - 1959 september 13 – november 25 CALENDAR 21 SEPTEMBER 22 OCTOBER 23 NOVEMBER 24 THE TOUCH OF MEMORY. THE OF september 15 – september 16 25 , CINEMATIC SEER september 21 – october 14 28 AN EVENING WITH MARGARET HONDA september 27 Djibril Diop Mambéty HYENAS

THE MCMILLAN-STEWART FELLOWSHIP: Djibril Diop Mambéty (1945 - 1998) has been described as an actor, orator, composer DIEUDO HAMADI and poet, deservedly, besides a legendary African filmmaker and—thanks in part to his september 28 – october 5 prénom—an “Angel.” He was born near Dakar in Kolobane, Senegal. “All my films speak about the city I was born in,” he’d once claim, “from the outskirts to the capital itself, be- 30 VITALINA VARELA cause the road from your birthplace to the capital is always the path of a desire called september 30 – october 7 emancipation.” He studied theatre at first, working on the after graduating from - ing school, before losing his job at the Daniel Sorano National Theatre and then teaching 31 CINEMA OF RESISTANCE himself the “Seventh Art.” Ultimately, he joins an amazing cinematic pantheon. After the late september 30 – november 24 Pan-African greats Ousmane Sembène and Med Hondo, as well as Haile Gerima and Sarah Maldoror, this “Prince of Kolobane” came to innovate for all Africa and the world 32 UNCOMFORTABLY YOURS. with his signature mix of wild style, rich traditional and virtuoso editing THE FILMS OF technique with impeccable political commitment. october 18 – november 16 For some, his “magnum opus” would be Hyènes, a stunning, sardonic tale of human consump- tion and World Bank colonialism (“a structural adjustment plan for souls and values”). His 35 FOUR FILMS BY FRANÇOIS OZON career on celluloid began at the age of twenty-three with two shorts: Contras’ City (1969) october 19 – november 15 and (1970). The latter won the Silver Tanit award at the Carthage Film Festival. However, was his debut feature that took the world by storm: . Its formal sophis- 36 THE TRANSCENDENT CINEMA OF DAVID BROOKS tication and Afro-cosmological audacity captivated and critics alike. A peerless october 20 – october 28 audio-visual experience ready-made for the global migration of today, it earned major awards at Cannes and the 8th Moscow International Film Festival. Next came an 38 MAKE MY DAY. THE CINEMATIC IMAGINATION OF enigmatic hiatus. Mambéty did not release another work for two decades, except one docu- THE REAGAN ERA mentary short: Parlons Grand-mère (Let’s talk, Grandmother, 1989). This is no trivial moment in october 31 – november 30 his catalogue. For, against the basics of film school orthodoxies, Mambéty highlights a core antagonism between “Grandma” and “grammar” (the two terms homonymous in colonial 40 MATI DIOP’S ATLANTIQUE French), to insist upon the importance of making a film language of one’s own for African november 18 Printer: TCI Press cinema: “Grandma wants us to reinvent grammar every time…. She tells me: ‘Go bash its face in … because all this space belongs to you, my grandson.’ Grandma has asked me to always reinvent her stories. To never stop recreating it to ensure her perpetuity.” He loved to All text written by Brittany Gravely and Haden Guest unless define cinema as magic and dreams, possibility and small wonders, something only possible otherwise noted. for him with its necessary reinvention – “as long as you’re not its slave.” Mambéty would On the cover: one of many arresting images from Godfrey Reggio's reappear in 1992 to reinvent his own voice for Hyenas, a voluptuous and sort of al- Privacy Campaign project, p. 27. legorical sequel to Touki Bouki, which was well-nigh Hip-Hop in cuts and , while Hyènes flows so slowly and marvelously, like Big Momma’s molasses.

staff

director collections archivist film conservation Herb Nipson founding curator Louis Chaisson Haden Guest Amy Sloper assistant Katie Soule Vlada Petric James “Bo” Clay Robert Vaszari Sean Sprecher Max Gorodentsev programming assistant collections manager special thanks Stefan Grabowski Karin Kolb Mark Johnson financial associate theater managers Verjana Abazaj Dan Kearney Regina Pellicano Amanda Bristow Anto Astudillo Asma Khoshmehr publicist/designer film technician/ Steven Brown Alexandra Bandow Emilie Liu Brittany Gravely head projectionist projectionists Andrew Gerzon Zuzanna Belska Shiying Meng John Quackenbush Scott Norwood Kevin Monahan Lisa Brown Soojin Park David Pendleton 1964 - 2017

2 On July 23, 1998, his body succumbed to lung cancer—only 53 years old. Yet this could not stop the magic of Djibril Diop Mambéty. He’d been preparing a striking trilogy of short films, entitledTales of Ordinary People (or, Contes des petites gens) as a whole. It includes Le Franc as well as La Petite Vendeuse du Soleil, which is to say, The Little Girl Who Sold , a posthumous marvel likely to steal every spectating heart. Touki Bouki and Hyenas were to comprise two parts of a dramatic series on “Power and Madness” themselves. There is also his virtually dateless collaboration with René Vautier’s Le Glas, in which Mambéty narrates in homage to three Zimbabwe African People’s Union martyrs over a Black Panther Party music soundtrack. His spectacular legacy lives on and perhaps strongest in the country of his birth. He actually named Waru Studio in Senegal, the youthful art-lab base of Fatou Kande Senghor’s current Wala Bok imaginings in Pan- African music, and film. Waru translates as “Wonderment.” What’s more, for the Dakar Biennale of 2018, Djibril Dramé and the slammeur “Minus” paid homage to the cinéaste by restaging his film-work in a photography-installation laying out twenty scenes from Badou Boy and Touki Bouki. Mambéty’s belief in Africa’s masses of was hardcore; and so is their everlasting belief in Mambéty. Hence, speaking of them and Hyenas, he maintains with that voice of an “Angel”: “If we are able to demystify wealth, the future of Africa is brilliant…. The future of Black people resides in its mission that goes back to the age of the pyramids and spreads far beyond. We do not cease to produce beauty. We only need be wary of the pathetic contagion of ‘Enlightenment,’ which is really not illumination at all, but simply electricity.” – Greg Thomas, Depart- ment of English & Africana Studies Program, Tufts University), author of The Sexual Demon of Colonial Power (2007), Hip-Hop Revolution in the Flesh (2009), and The Immortal George L. Jackson (forthcoming) Film descriptions by Brittany Gravely, unless otherwise noted. friday september 6 at 7pm himself, Dramaan, whose sacrificial status allows him Djibril Diop Mambéty THE LITTLE GIRL WHO SOLD THE SUN friday september 6 at 9pm to palpably comprehend the injustice. Vividly illus- saturday september 7 at 7pm trated in a Touki Bouki-esque magical reality with out a better existence for them both. As the only sunday september 8 at 4:30pm potent iconography—Ramatou’s golden prosthetics female newspaper seller, she encounters constant monday september 9 at 7pm are particularly striking—Hyenas both encapsulates obstacles along the way, yet reacts by simply stand- ing up for herself and others. Nonchalantly fighting HYENAS (HYÈNES) and transcends the complexity of the postcolonial for equality and justice, Sili’s courage and resilience Both an adaptation of Swiss playwright Friedrich African experience. In the words of film scholar are depicted with a mix of joy and hardship, but Dürrenmatt’s The Visit (1956) and a spiritual Clyde Taylor, “[Hyenas] is singular in leaving no no saccharine. The second in his unfinished Tales of sequel to Touki Bouki, Mambéty’s rich un- ideological or sociological space for any viewer to Little People trilogy after Le Franc, this film—likeHy - folds in the village of Kolobane, the director’s birth- hide, African or foreign, black or white, female or enas before it—mixes realism with allegory, taking place and that of the wealthy, worldly Linguère male, in witnessing the crisis of contemporary a “small” story and making it as powerful as the sun. Ramatou, who left it long ago, forced into a life humanity from an African viewpoint.” of dissolution and suffering that happened to pay Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. With Mansour Diouf, Ami Diakhate, Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. With Moussa Baldé, Lissa Balera, Djibril Diop Mambéty Aminata Fall off financially. Her much-anticipated return elicits Senegal/Switzerland/ 1992, DCP, color, 110 min. Wolof with Eng- Senegal/Switzerland 1999, DCP, color, 45 min. Wolof with English an exultant response from Kolobane’s desperate lish subtitles subtitles populace, whose dreams of opulence suddenly af- flict them with a selective memory and a malleable $5 WEEKEND MATINEE ADMISSION LE FRANC moral compass. It is Mambéty himself—as Rama- saturday september 7 at 3pm In “a time of uncertainty”—quoting the radio an- tou’s newly appointed Chief Justice—who outlines THE LITTLE GIRL WHO SOLD THE SUN nouncement inviting people impoverished by the the part local shopkeep Dramaan Drameh played (LA PETITE VENDEUSE DE SOLEIL) CFA franc’s devaluation to try their luck playing the lottery—Mambéty went beyond mere observation in her downfall, fatally sentencing him while grant- Mambéty describes what would be his final film and elevated his anarchic and rebellious vision by ing the town riches beyond their wildest dreams. as “a hymn to the courage of street children,” but creating the antisocial of Marigo. With his Ramatou’s cruel, conditional “gift” pulls the curtain like all of his works, it is also a hymn to Senegal, easy-going walk and Chaplinesque clothes, Marigo back on capitalism—exposing the essential dynamic to post-colonial Africa and to resourceful visionar- immediately expresses his irreverent nature: he spits within a society centered around money and mate- ies like the courageous girl of the title. Undaunted on the floor of his shack and blows his nose ona rial accumulation. The only character conscious of by poverty or handicap, the young Sili Laam leaves towel like an unruly teenager. His comic nature turns the depths of this spiritual crisis is the guilty man her blind grandmother begging in the street to seek into an art like in Chaplin’s silent films, almost without words. Marigo speaks through facial expressions, and he does not give in to the bad luck that seems to chase him. Like Chaplin, there is always a glimpse of optimism: the strength of Mambéty’s characters lies in their dignity, courage and rejection of fatal- ism and resignation. They are of hope in contrast with Afro-pessimism, the lack of faith in the continent’s capability to develop, which was emerg- ing at that same time. – Alessandra Speciale Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. With Dieye Ma, Aminata Fall, Demba Bâ Senegal/Switzerland/France 1999, DCP, 46 min. Wolof with English subtitles

Both films restored in 2K in 2019 by Waka Films with the support of the Institut français, Cinémathèque Af- rique and CNC – Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée, in agreement with Teemur Mambéty, at Éclair laboratories from the original negative. Also screening as part of the Weekend Matinee program, p. 4. Djibril Diop Mambéty TOUKI BOUKI HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 3 saturday september 7 at 9pm soundtrack and all variations of mythical, marginal sunday september 8 at 7pm and undefinable characters, Touki Bouki is a star- TOUKI BOUKI tlingly unique cinematic hybrid, actively resisting Translated as The Hyena’s Journey, Mambéty’s daz- voyeuristic exoticization, avant-garde pretension or zling debut feature about two modern lovers—at- moralistic messaging, opting instead for breaking tempting to swindle their way to from Dakar— through the layers of colonization and acknowledg- is as mischievous as its , upending any ing both the expanse and the mirage within pos- attempts to reduce it to any particular cinematic sibility. categorization. His complex, fragmented and mul- Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. With Magaye Niang, Mareme Niang, tidimensional approach eschews the limitations of a Cristophe Colomb Senegal 1973, DCP, color, 88 min. Wolof and French with English subtitles dominant narrative arc (or hierarch)—perhaps since all of those have been designated by the colonizers. Touki Bouki was restored in 2008 by the Cineteca di Instead, as Mory and Anta’s lost souls recklessly nav- Bologna/L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, in associa- igate Dakar’s disrupted, disjointed postcolonial lim- tion with ’s World Cinema Project boland, the film travels through , allegory, polit- and the family of Djibril Diop Mambéty. Restoration ical parody, internal dreamstate—often balancing funded by Armani, Cartier, Qatar Airways, and Qatar multiple modes simultaneously. With an occasionally Museum Authority. off-kilter camera, lyrical jump-cutting, amusingly ef- fective “magical” editing, an ingeniously disparate Djibril Diop Mambéty LE FRANC

WEEKEND MATINEE SEPTEMBER 7 – NOVEMBER 16

The HFA continues its specially priced screenings of films for children and accompanying adults, plus two special selections for teenagers. Drawing from the Harvard Film Archive collection, this series of classic and contemporary films are screened in their original formats and languages. All Weekend Matinee screenings are $5 or admission-free for holders of a valid Cambridge Public Library card! Film descriptions by Brittany Gravely and Karin Kolb, unless otherwise noted. Special thanks: Goethe-Institut, Boston. saturday september 7 at 3pm THE LITTLE GIRL WHO SOLD THE SUN (LA PETITE VENDEUSE DE SOLEIL) Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. With Moussa Baldé, Lissa Balera, Aminata Fall Senegal/Switzerland 1999, DCP, color, 45 min. Wolof with English subtitles

LE FRANC Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. With Dieye Ma, Aminata Fall, Demba Bâ Senegal/Switzerland/France 1999, DCP, 46 min. Wolof with English subtitles

Age recommendation: 8+ See descriptions in Djibril Diop Mambéty program, p. 3. saturday september 21 at 3pm SUPA MODO Obsessed with Jackie Chan and films, termi- nally ill Jo, a brave and witty nine-year-old, finds comfort in her dreams of being a superhero. When her mother takes her back to her rural village to live out the rest of her short life, her teenage sis- Likarion Wainaina SUPA MODO ter Mwix motivates the entire village of Maweni to make Jo’s dream come true. Stunning newcomer Sty- award. Presented in collaboration with the Goethe- SCREENS FOR TEENS cie Waweru as Jo makes us believe that superheroes Institut, Boston. saturday october 5 at 3pm really do come in all ages, shapes and sizes in this Age recommendation: 11+. Content advisory: This GOOD BYE, LENIN! tremendously moving drama. This honest and inspir- uplifting film deals with difficult issues, including the At the time one of the most successful German films ing story about the strength of young people in the impending death of a child. ever made, Wolfgang Becker’s clever tragicomedy face of adversity is brought to us by first-time fea- begins in East Germany in 1989, right before the ture filmmaker Likarion Wainaina, with the help of Directed by Likarion Wainaina. With Stycie Waweru, Marrianne Nungo, Nyawara Ndambia fall of the Wall. Alex’s mother has slipped co-producer . Supa Modo won more than Germany/Kenya 2018, DCP, color, 74 min. English, Kikuyu and Swahili into a coma, missing the historic event and its after- twenty prizes at international film festivals, includ- with English subtitles math. When she awakens in 1990, any excitement ing the 2019 European Children’s Film Association could be fatal for her, so her son—Daniel Brühl in 4 his breakthrough role—sees only one way out: he must conceal the fall of the socialist regime she had so embraced and pretend East Germany still ex- ists. Out goes the modern furniture and back comes her old bedroom, as well as now hard-to-find prod- ucts like her favorite Spreewaldgurken (East German pickles). As the modern world threatens to encroach on his carefully constructed time capsule, Alex and his coworker at a satellite TV company even create an “alternative” history for her evening news pro- gram. The film playfully and poignantly expresses that disorienting period of change and nostalgia. Thirty years later, find out what it is like, in Becker’s words, “when your everyday culture suddenly stops overnight and is replaced by something else.” Print courtesy the Goethe-Institut. In collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, Boston. Age recommendation: 15+. Content advisory: Nu- dity, strong language and alcohol consumption. Directed by Wolfgang Becker. With Daniel Brühl, Katrin Saß, Chulpan Khamatova Germany 2003, 35mm, color & b/w, 121 min. German, English and Rus- Tobe Hooper POLTERGEIST sian with English subtitles one movie requires a little more levity than your av- images and watercolors that explode with vibrant erage poltergeist can provide. color. The film’s music—a soundscape of pan flute, Age recommendation: 15+ samba and Brazilian hip-hop—is on equal footing with the stunning visuals as it mixes with the whirling Directed by Tobe Hooper. With Jobeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight carnival colors and exploding fireworks. Audiences US 1982, 35mm, color, 114 min of all ages will experience different levels of the same narrative when the seemingly simple story be- saturday november 16 at 3pm comes a cautionary tale. Winner of Cristal Award BOY AND THE WORLD (O MENINO E O MUNDO) for Best and Award at the Open your senses to a refreshingly original, unique- prestigious Annecy International Animated Film Fes- ly animated feature film from Brazil. Cuca, a small tival. In conjunction with the opening of the new Va- boy, lives a life of quiet wonder exploring all that lente Branch Library in Cambridge. the countryside has to offer. But his cozy life is shat- Age recommendation: 8+ tered when his father has to leave for the city to find Directed by Alê Abreu. With Vinicius Garcia, Marco Aurélio Campos, Lu Horta a job. Cuca’s quest to reunite the family sends him on Brazil 2013, DCP, color, 80 min. Invented language an adventurous journey. Director Alê Abreu’s striking style employs crayon-like drawings, kaleidoscopic

Wolfgang Becker GOOD BYE, LENIN!

SCREENS FOR TEENS saturday october 26 at 3pm POLTERGEIST Directed by Tobe Hooper, produced and written by , the film often seems like signa- ture Spielberg—including the middle-class family dynamic and a focus on children that lends a softer, but no less scary, edge to the disturbing events sud- denly taking place in the Freeling home. A crafted to scare viewers of all ages, Poltergeist barely earned its PG-rating because of a single scene of surreal gore. With special effects that have aged relatively well, the film is now a compendium of iconic phenomena—Carol Anne’s hands on the television, the carnivorous tree tapping against the bedroom window, the possessed clown doll, Zelda Rubinstein’s indelible medium—ingrained in pop culture’s psyche. Despite touching on modern prob- lems such as suburban alienation, rampant homog- enous development, missing children, desecration of sacred land, media messages, and of course, the power of television, the film and its family always maintain a certain positivity and lightheartedness, perhaps because realizing so many primal fears in Alê Abreu BOY AND THE WORLD HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 5 THE B-FILM. LOW-BUDGET HOLLYWOOD CINEMA 1935 - 1959 SEPTEMBER 13 – NOVEMBER 25

This retrospective reconsiders the history and legacy of that singular of low- budget filmmaking invented within the Hollywood studio system and kindled long after as an and an inspiration by diverse filmmakers from Jean-Luc Godard and Seijun Suzuki to Hartmut Bitomsky and Kathryn Bigelow. The B-film was a historically specific mode of cinema that flourished from the mid- until the 1948 Paramount Decree, thanks to the institution of the double bill and the dedicated B-units established within the major studios. A major aim of this archaeological project is to carefully recover the real and historically specific meaning of the B-film by showcasing its most exemplary expressions and by starting to assemble a canon. Long used as a pejorative and nostal- gist term, the B-film needs to be recognized as a unique and quintessentially American art form, albeit one created largely by emigres and artists whose work and careers remained on the margins. During its heyday, the B-film embraced to the fullest degree that paradoxical ideal of the studio system as “art factory” by realizing a remarkably efficient mode of pure cinema that simultaneously returned to cinema’s vaudevillian and “attraction” origins while embracing diverse avant-garde currents, from to photogénie to Soviet montage. While the stylish and extraordinarily resourceful films of producer and emigre director Edgar G. Ulmer leap immediately to mind, equally important are examples of formally innovative yet lesser known B-films showcased here, such as Wil- André De Toth CRIME WAVE liam Castle’s When Strangers Marry and Joseph H. Lewis’ . This retrospective also reveals the B-film as a vital incubator for a kind of innovation and experimentation in and narrative otherwise rare in studio-era cinema. In this way, for example, the origins of what would later be celebrated as can be traced to seminal proto-noir B-films, such as Blind Alley and Stranger on the Third Floor, each a psychoanalytically informed vision of criminal pathology as a waking nightmare. Another important showcase of the seemingly free-ranging imagination of the B-film are those works chosen for the retrospective that are linked by a fascination with the supernatural and the occult, among them , The Falcon and the Co-eds and Weird Woman, which together offer a remarkably frank address of the mysteries of death and spiritual belief not often seen in more topically serious “A” features of the time. Equally striking is the radical hybridization of genre that animates key B-films such as William McGann’s outlandish and shapeshifting comedy-mystery-horror filmSh! The Octopus or the tongue-in-cheek murder mystery Nine Girls. In these unclassifiable films, we can start to understand the B-film as a different and often self-conscious mode of filmmaking, one used by the studios to experiment with bending and giving new shape to already established genre formulas. The majority of the films in this series are presented as double-bills to evoke the B-film’s status as the second part of the show and to showcase how the great B-films create a kind of shock effect of contrast with, and subversion of, what came before. While focused upon the 1935-1948 period, this series also points towards the afterlife of the B-film by including a group of Fifties films mostly made by individuals trained earlier in B production, such as Joseph H. Lewis and Norman Foster. In the post-Classical era the B-film lingered on, though differently, in the work of inven- tive directors and producers who deliberately and subversively forged artistic freedom and possibility on the lower end of the budget scale, such as , and . Further legacies of the B-film are suggested by showcasing in this retrospective the legendary , Jr. as well as pioneering yet little known independent directors Hubert Cornfield and Irving Lerner. For in these filmmakers’ diverse works we see embodied later mutations of the B-film into al- ternate modes of low-budget production—exploitation, schlock and the low-budget genre/—that each adopt and reinvented, in their own way, the remarkable example and mantle of the studio-era B-film. – HG A version of this program originally appeared as the centerpiece of the 2018 Viennale. The accompanying book The B-Film, Low Budget Hollywood Cinema 1935-1959 is available for sale at the HFA box office and in the Carpenter Center Bookshop. Special thanks: Eva Sangiorgi—Viennale; Michael Loebenstein and Jurij Meden—Austrian Film Museum; and Alexander Horwath. Descriptions by Haden Guest, unless otherwise noted. friday september 13 at 7pm (restored print) sunday september 15 at 7pm (original print) DETOUR Al Roberts, played somberly by Tom Neal, somewhere at the start of the film utters the phrase: “Fate sticks out a foot to trip you.” Roberts’ fate will be meeting, in labyrinthine ways, Vera, wonderfully portrayed by Ann Savage. Fate will become the constant and mounting fear that fears itself. Fate will become a nightmare of infinite proportions that agglutinates the very dark story that we are horribly being told. This film, one of the most disturbing pieces that I saw in my youth after pursuing it in every film club in Mexico, influ- enced by the recommendation of some of the iconic members of the French Nouvelle Vague, left a profound impression in me. The morbid pace, ominous and rather slow, the pace of nightmares, gave me reason to try as I could to envelop my movies with the notion of the nightmare, of the force of fate and the occurrence of omnipresent fear. – Arturo Ripstein Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. With Tom Neal, Ann Savage, Claudia Drake US 1945, 35mm, b/w, 65 min

Restored in 2018 by the Academy Film Archive and The Film Foundation in collaboration with Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, The Museum of and Cinémathèque Française. Restoration funding provided by the Family Foundation. Edgar G. Ulmer DETOUR 6 sessed by unnamed forces, with Gene Evans entirely bandits impervious to the torrential rain that lashes unconvincing as either an alcoholic or a scientist, and about them. Wasting no precious time, Cornfield’s Nancy Davis locked into a stunned expression, giv- world-weary robbers divide the loot into three Los ing equal affection to both the latest test monkey Angeles-bound getaway trucks, into motion and her traumatized husband. a tense race against luck, each moment on the road Directed by Felix E. Feist. With Lew Ayres, Gene Evans, Nancy Davis fraught with danger. Rarely have routine traffic en- US 1953, 16mm, b/w, 83 min counters been so loaded with the tension conveyed by the veteran actors assembled by Cornfield, fea- saturday september 14 at 7pm turing Thirties musical star as the sunday september 22 at 3:30pm team’s suave mastermind and the ever-anxious Eli- CRIME WAVE sha Cook Jr. as their guilty conscience. Making bril- One of the great Hollywood films by the two-fisted liant use of the black-and-white widescreen, master and one-eyed Hungarian émigré director André De DP Ernest Haller crisply delineates the action with Toth, Crime Wave is a brisk -and-robbers caper noir abstraction while using bold Pop of that exemplifies the lean economy, expressive style roadside Americana to ironically punctuate the per- and dark sense of embittered injustice shared by ilous criminal journey. his Westerns and crime films of the late 40s and Directed by Hubert Cornfield. With Gene Raymond, Jeanne Cooper, Wayne Morris 50s. When De Toth rejected Jack Warner’s choice US 1957, 35mm, b/w, 72 min of and as leads, the mogul angrily cut both budget and production schedule in half but reluctantly allowed De Toth to cast Sterling Hayden as the film’s , a tough cop leaning hard on a parolee he suspects, almost correctly, of covering for a dangerous band of rob- FIVE CAME BACK bers recently escaped from the pen. Little does he Among Nathanael West’s most significant screen know that the crooks are hiding in plain sight, holed credits is co- of John Farrow’s Five Came Back, up in the cold water flat of the hapless parolee and a tense proto- film about a South America- his young wife, who are held hostage and forced to bound aircraft that crashes in the jungle and, as the join a recklessly audacious heist. Master cinematog- suggestive title makes clear, can only accommodate rapher Bert Glennon made it possible for De Toth fewer than half of its twelve passengers on its hob- to shoot quite daring—for the time—night scenes bled return flight. “But who?” the audience is asked on location, allowing the film to dramatically extend to ponder while judging the motley gang of intellec- the neorealist style popular in post-WWII crime tuals, criminals and innocents fatefully united on the . rickety craft and portrayed by a rich cast of charac- Directed by André De Toth. With Sterling Hayden, Gene Nelson, ter actors and rising stars, including Phyllis Kirk US 1954, 16mm, b/w, 74 min as a hard-boiled pilot, C. Aubrey Smith, predictably, Hubert Cornfield PLUNDER ROAD as a distinguished professor, and in a PLUNDER ROAD revealing role as a tenderhearted “fallen woman.” saturday september 14 at 9:45pm Raised in Paris, where he befriended Godard and While co-writer ’s Leftist leanings are ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN Chabrol, Hubert Cornfield brought a stylized- Eu clearly expressed in the self-righteous figure of the Freed from his Fox contract as the popular Mr. Moto, noble anarchist, West’s lurid humanism is rendered ropean flair to his low-budget films of the . With his taut heist Plunder Road, one can also leapt to Columbia to release his dark- vivid in the sweaty, ribald intensity of undesired hu- est demons into this standout performance as the man intimacy and the ominous tom-toms of the un- detect a clear influence on the late sangfroid crime films of Jean-Pierre Melville, beginning with an in- sadistic owner of a remote penal colony off the seen but ever-approaching cannibals that recall the Florida coast. A white slaver who delights in deliv- bloodthirsty throng exploding in violent rage at the credible extended opening sequence: a deftly cho- reographed freight train robbery by silent, masked ering equally ruthless punishment to both his pris- apocalyptic end of The Day of the Locust. oner subjects and poor domestic pets, he reserves a Directed by John Farrow. With Chester Morris, Lucille Ball, Wendy Barrie stranger, psychosexual torture for his long-suffering US 1939, 35mm, b/w, 75 min wife. With Island of Doomed Men, Columbia pushed hard against the Hays Code with a seedy and de- friday september 13 at 9:15pm liberately perverse portrait of criminal injustice em- DONOVAN’S BRAIN bodied by Lorre’s twisted despot and highlighted Adapted earlier by Republic as a low-budget von by suggestive-yet-indelible images of savage vio- Stroheim vehicle, ’s cult was lence. director Charles Barton transformed again with streamlined efficiency by gives free reign to Lorre’s unhinged screen presence, Felix E. Feist into a classic of Fifties’ sci-fi and an which almost overwhelms the film, relegating all oth- offbeat of the long line of mad scientist fan- er characters to second tier, including Thirties star- tasies that stretch across the Golden Age of the B- let Rochelle in the difficult role of a fragile film. Veteran actor Lew Ayres gives dignity to his Beauty held in the grip of Lorre’s suavely menacing portrait of a scientist whose zeal for extending life Beast. leads him far down the dark path to perdition when Directed by Charles Barton. With Peter Lorre, Rochelle Hudson, he reanimates the powerful brain of a ruthless bil- Robert Wilcox lionaire killed in a crash, only to be made victim to US 1940, 35mm, b/w, 68 min the pulsing organ’s uncanny powers of mind-body control. Ayres’ transformation into a hardened bil- monday september 23 at 7pm lionaire remains remarkably contemporary, with his THE LEOPARD MAN strange lust for ludicrously expensive and ill-fitting As the third and final film directed by Jacques Tour- suits predicting Paul Manafort, among other power- neur for the legendary Val Lewton, The Leopard Man hungry tycoons. Almost subversively, the supporting forges a striking trilogy by profoundly extending actors also seem to be rendered wooden and pos- Felix E. Feist DONOVAN'S BRAIN and responding to the earlier two films, Cat People HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 7 and I Walked With a . Besides the deceptive- of making money—and able to breathtaking ly lurid titles imposed upon Lewton by RKO, the three dialectical counter-aesthetics. – Hartmut Bitomsky films share a similar and , each - offer Directed by Irving Lerner. With Vince Edwards, Phillip Pine, ing brooding and melancholy meditating on Herschel Bernardi outsiderness, mortality and the specter of an inexo- US 1958, 35mm, b/w, 81 min rable yet arbitrary fate. These are, of course, major themes that resonate across the rest of Lewton’s RKO sunday october 6 at 5pm productions and Tourneur’s later films. InThe Leopard BABES ON SWING STREET Man, however, these themes are given a new dimen- A spirited example of the B-musical, Universal’s sion by a radical narrative strategy that deliber- Babes on Swing Street was an early vehicle for star- ately denies the spectator any fixed character iden- in-training Ann Blyth—as Carol Curtis—then only fif- tification and profoundly reorients the terms of the teen and at the very start of her career, just before supernatural mystery genre so successfully invented her breakthrough role as Mildred Pierce’s venomous by the previous two Tourneur-Lewton films. The criti- daughter. Babes on Swing Street takes delight in its cal distance defined by The Leopard Man from the threadbare musical numbers, staged as the brico- earlier films also marked an important departure lage inventions of a youth social club raising money for Tourneur, announcing the pointed-yet-understat- for music conservatory scholarships by putting on a ed engagement with genre and narrative that would fundraising extravaganza in a convention hall sur- Charles Barton ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN become one of the signatures of his deeply nuanced reptitiously borrowed from Carol’s wealthy but par- cinema. almost physical independence from the world of the simonious aunt. Among the highlights are the film’s Directed by . With Dennis O’Keefe, Margo, film. – Chris Fujiwara hilarious opening number by an aspiring hoofer si- US 1943, 35mm, b/w, 66 min Directed by Mark Robson. With Richard Dix, , multaneously tap-dancing and shaving a customer US 1943, 16mm, b/w, 69 min at her father’s music-school-adjacent barber shop. With its college sweaters, trendy dances and proto- saturday september 28 at 9pm jive talk, the rarely screened film offers fascinating MURDER BY CONTRACT glimpses into WWII-era youth culture that anticipate Fifties Hollywood’s programmatic and often painful At the time of Murder By Contract’s production, the appeal to younger audiences. double-feature as an institution was gradually com- ing to an end. The film tells a story that runs paral- Directed by Edward C. Lilley. With Ann Blyth, Peggy Ryan, Marion Hutton US 1944, 35mm, b/w, 69 min lel to this change. A pedantic and compulsive but shrewd petty-bourgeois character hires himself out as a contract killer. His victim is a woman who is the sunday october 6 at 7pm key witness in a trial. He doesn’t succeed in accom- THE MAN THEY COULD NOT HANG plishing his mission; he doesn’t have the heart to do Written by Karl Brown, for years a cameraman for it. His client then puts two men on him while the killer D.W. Griffith (he also tried directing, not without suc- in turn searches for the client he now wants to kill. cess, before settling on writing), and directed by the affable Nick Grinde (who once wrote, “The B direc- The film plays through the dialectics of the relation- tor has to know more tricks than Harry Houdini did, ship between subject and object as conveyed by a and he has to pull them out of his hat right now—not tool that triggers a process in which all positions are after lunch”), this ingenious and entertaining film is exchanged. The object becomes the tool and the the vehicle for one of ’s best perfor- tool wants to become the subject. A of mances. Everything that happens in the film is fun Hegelian dimensions. and interesting, and not a moment is wasted. The Edward C. Lilley BABES ON SWING STREET At the same time, the film is an example of aB- film ends with an unanswered question hanging in movie liberated from the of large-scale pro- the air; this ending comes, unfortunately, too soon ductions—that for Hollywood are merely a means (interrupting Karloff’s plan of serial revenge, which Unavailable for many years and now seated in the canon of the works of producer Val Lewton a bit insecurely (because it has even fewer supernatural elements than director Mark Robson has defenders), The Ghost Ship might be called the most charac- teristic Lewton film. All Lewton is in it: quiet, almost over-purified performances; a liberal-humanist- at tentiveness to women, minorities and the disabled; the atmosphere of brooding disquiet that pervades a universe made to seem real by a few well-chosen details of writing and production design; scenes of suffocating that emerge from inside a melancholy dreariness. As for Mark Robson, it could be argued that of the three main Lewton directors, he (rather than Jacques Tourneur or ) is the most suited to realizing Lewton’s vision, because his own talent as a director, as his post-Lewton films confirm, lies in a pragmatic and impersonal accep- tance of whatever materials the script and the pro- duction place before him. As a result, the weapons in The Ghost Ship (scalpel, hook, chain, spike) look truly threatening, and the actors, in particular Russell Wade as the beleaguered third officer and Richard Dix as the authority-maddened captain, take on an Irving Lerner MURDER BY CONTRACT 8 field in Browning’s and Dr. ’s assistant in Whale’s iconic adaptation) signals an alignment with the then-popular Gothic-imbued horror films, a connection underscored by the film’s source (one of Edgar Allan Poe’s lesser known bur- ied-alive nightmares). Rather than a dark castle or dungeon, The Crime of Dr. Crespi is set largely within a white-on-white clinic transformed by Expressionist shadows into a dramatic stage for von Stroheim’s fiendish to exert a cruel revenge. Auer’s inde- pendent production was picked up by the fledgling Republic as its first release and the first of many genre films Auer would direct for the studio. 35mm preservation print courtesy UCLA Film and Television Archive. Directed by John H. Auer. With , Harriet Russell, Dwight Frye US 1935, 35mm, b/w, 63 min

Jacques Tourneur THE LEOPARD MAN has the full support of every viewer of the film), but THE CRIME OF DR. CRESPI in that untimeliness a bleak and awful judgment After his tragic fall from grace as a visionary but about the finality of existence is expressed in an notoriously uncompromising director, Erich von Stro- ideally dry and succinct way. heim transitioned to a prolific-yet-poignant career Like all B-movies, The Man They Could Not Hang is a as an actor who brought a menacing Old World sto- commentary on its own production. The newspaper icism and indelible presence to his best roles, even in editor instructs his reporter—“Make it weird, make otherwise forgettable B-films. The Viennese-educat- it dramatic, and make it snappy!”—in words Grinde ed Hungarian émigré John H. Auer gave von Stro- and Brown might have heard in a meeting with the heim one of his memorable early roles as the titular head of their unit. – Chris Fujiwara Dr. Crespi, a venerated surgeon nursing a wounded heart and a festering jealousy of the rival surgeon Directed by Nick Grinde. With Boris Karloff, Lorna Gray, Robert Wilcox THE GHOST SHIP US 1939, 35mm, b/w, 64 min who stole his girl. The presence of Dwight Frye (Ren- Mark Robson

YES. I WOULD LIKE TO BECOME A MEMBER BECOME A MEMBER OF THE HFA OF THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE student/senior $35 dual plus $200 $5 tickets to regular programs, reserved Same as Individual Plus, but for two. __ student/senior __ dual plus tickets for special events and free admis- sion to three regular screenings for those silver screen society $300 __ individual __ silver screen society 65 and older or students with a valid col- Free admission to all programs for one, in- __ dual __ director’s circle lege ID. cluding Special Events, and free one-year subscription to magazine. __ individual plus __ friend of the archive individual $55 $6 tickets to regular programs, reserved director’s circle $500 tickets for special events and free admis- Free admission to all programs for two, in- name sion to three regular screenings. cluding Special Events and free one-year subscription to Film Comment. address dual $100 Same benefits as Individual, but for two. friend of the archive $750 city/state/zip Free admission to all programs for two, individual plus $125 including Special Events; a free one-year telephone Same as Individual plus $8 tickets for Spe- subscription to Film Comment; plus invi- cial Events (applies to $12 ticketed events tation for two to private screenings and email only). events. Make checks payable to and mail to: Memberships last for one year from date of purchase. For more information call 617.496.3211. Brittany Gravely, HFA, 24 Quincy St, Cambridge MA 02138

HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 9 friday october 11 at 7pm sunday october 13 at 4:30pm 1 Goin’ to the movies I found a shelter from the sun Heard a gruesome story About a couple on the run. – from the song “Summertime” by Galaxie 500

You make me shiver, I feel so tender We make a pretty good team Don’t get exhausted, I’ll do some driving You ought to get you some sleep – from the song “Life During Wartime” by Talking Heads

Gun Crazy is incontestably the ultimate film of L’Amour Fou. Fugitive newlyweds escalating through all the majors and minors of larceny and felony, an ascent to the downward spiral. Nick Ray’s adaption of Thieves Like Us, They Live By Night (1948) started something. Interrupted innocents, tender love on the lam with two kids “never properly introduced to this world.” A couple deserving of a second chance. Denied. In Gun Crazy, Bart and Laurie emerge already tarnished, prodigal, prodigious sharpshooters, mutually dependent with ignited libidos trying to balance each other’s opposing moral codes. They go together “like guns and ammunition.” Vulnerable, capable, madly in love clinging to fetish and phobia, clinging to each other, propelled by desperation and dreams. What other film evokes this degree of heightened eroticism and loneliness entwined in disequilibrium. Just one reason why this masterwork from the low-budget peripheries intoxicates and puts us at the altitudes of Borzage and Grémillon. When their love takes them beyond reason and safety they look towards a lost horizon, their losses accumulating with each heist. This film induces heartbreak long before its eerie, magisterial ending that reminds us of the filmic poetry of Mizoguchi and Murnau. Seeking refuge in the falling snow or enshrouded in mist, wrapped in the illusory veils of Maya, the couple drives towards an unreachable stillness. Whenever they seem trapped they try to blast their way out. Bart to Laurie: It’s just that everything is going so fast. It’s all in such high gear. It doesn’t feel like me. It’s as if none of it really happened as if nothing were real anymore. The blacklisted Dalton Trumbo writing undercover kept the heart of ’s script, built it for speed, cut it to the bone, polished the skeleton like a mad team of white ants. Joseph H. Lewis and cinematographer Russell Harlan (cameraman for Hawks, Minnelli, Preminger, Curtiz, De Toth, Mulligan) gave it a uniquely dynamic visual poetry, inventiveness and excitement. The justly cel- ebrated long-take bank heist getaway is not an isolated incident in terms of innovation and expressiveness. The camera is empathy in action, cornering us as witnesses, implicating us as accessories before we realize it. The not-to-be-maligned former slot machine salesmen The King Brothers (Mono- graph Pictures) produced. Given reduced means and unerring instincts, they granted freedom, creating the ideal circumstances for one of the greatest films of any genre or era. John Dall had recently appeared in Hitchcock’s Rope and the underexposed reemerged decades later in Tourneur’s . These two actors seemed an unlikely match on paper but they surpassed them- selves, both giving the greatest performances of their careers. As the doomed couple they bringing spontaneity and incandescent chemistry to the screen. Both inhabited their roles like it was their life story. You have to remind yourself that these were not their only roles. Was this independent low-budget masterpiece what Hollywood could have been or an augur of ? Neither and both. In 2019, when we are in need of a new future and a (truthful) new past, we can see that Gun Crazy was an unquestionable influence on many films that followed but remains untouchably unique.

10 2 Yonder stands your orphan with his gun. – Bob Dylan your name is downpour and your name is meadow / your name is high tide / you have all the names of water / But your sex is unnameable / the other face of being / the other face of time – Octavio Paz “Clear Night” (extract)

Gun Crazy begins dreamlike in a downpour in heightened unreality . A nocturnal feverish wet dream of precipitation and uncontrollable de- sire. Nine beautifully composed shots placed inside a little over a minute’s time composed as an overture that feels like a (but isn’t), where echoes in embryo hatch clues to identity and fate, hinting at the circuitry of the film itself. A fourteen-year-old boy stealthily moves through the rain, rounding a corner into a late-night deserted street. An area of small commercial stores as American as a Saturday Evening Post illustration becomes a metaphysical arena like a Gol- gotha, a corrida or a de Chirico piazza, the scene of a crime. A hardware store display case beckons, its glass vault a reliquary of rifles and pistols begging for possession. Bart: “I like shooting ‘em, Judge. I don’t know why, but I feel good when I’m shooting them. I feel awful good inside like I’m somebody.” The camera tracks back as the boy moves forward, revealing itself to be on the other side of the glass, inside the recess of the coveted interior. Completely absent of dialogue, this primal scene—with its graphic character of high-key lighting and sharp contrast—is as striking as a sequence of woodcuts in the wordless of Frans Masereel. But there is the sound of rain, of shattering glass, a stolen gun skidding across a slick street. There are surprising sympa- thetic camera movements in counterpoint to the trembling dance of the guilty boy. Movements that propel us into another realm of identification and affinity. Bart slips face down into the street. Behind the fallen child are distinctive cursive silver letters, an ordinary yet prophetic name on a store Marsh/Marsh’s. This is a word clue that forecasts a chase in the “San Lorenzo” marsh, where the ex- hausted couple struggles through moonlit streams and obscure bogs to the sound of barking hounds. After the boy tumbles in the street and a towering policeman—a familiar guard- ian figure made menacing by close framing—waits to close in, we spot evocative words that speak the alluring irrational lingo of American advertising, language that whispers to the unconscious mind. Appearing on another store window the brand name: “THOR Automagic” A now-obsolete hybrid appliance that once promised cleansing with “gentle agita- tion.” Other store windows will reappear in the future. Jewelry displays and pawn shops. A wedding ring purchased later put up for hock. The Tammy Wynette song “Golden Ring” illustrates the ironic trajectory of the symbolic inanimate ob- ject directed by romantic deterioration. The wedding band before the ceremony and after divorce. But our couple stays emotionally solvent, even more deeply bound as their circumstances become more alarming. We have been introduced to Bart Tare. And the runaway energy of the film has been in set in motion.

3 I first sawGun Crazy about forty years ago in the tugboat-shaped Thalia where the rake of the theater paradoxically tilted upwards towards the screen. Double bills were often shown uninterrupted without the lights ever coming up. Some- times it was too scary to see who was sitting near you. The film glowed on screen. Love at first sight. I was thunderstruck. Novel vivid propulsive. Pulp gospel. I felt like was receiving a hidden sacrament of cin- ema. The film felt like something that really happened. Like something that was happening as I watched it, something that was happening to me. The kind of experience you have as a child when films are overpowering, vicarious and hal- lucinatory with secret actions and drives that make you feel eerily complicit or prematurely adult. Films that make you love every moment, even the gestures you can’t quite grasp. Films that seem to want to break your heart then nurse you back to health in the aftermath as you remember them.

HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 11 Gun Crazy combines single-take spontaneity and realism, the feeling of docu- the law off their trail, they prove inseparable. As their separate getaway cars mentary occurrences with rear-screen artifice, backlot sets and actual locations. are ready to diverge, they screech to a halt and reunite in tears of joy. Love calls The reality and the surreality of the meat plant carcasses. The late-night road- us by our name, and we see the truth laid bare. Only the Heart matters. side diners, cheap hotel rooms, the desperate refuge of a woodshed in the fall- ing snow, weary bodies crying in the mist, the enchanted and the tawdry. Lust is different than love but love is the strongest aphrodisiac. Hopelessness breeds 5 hope. If you knew, all the dreams I had about you / Then you’d know I’ve got it bad about Poetry as straight talk, poetry as innuendo. Combustible poetry. The power of you – “Mad About You,” Gun Crazy theme song, lyrics Ned Washington, music the cut. Victor Young Made on a shoestring. But there is no sign of the patchwork collage, substitutions or anything “make do” in this film. All coheres in a fabric unified by emotion. Both Bart and Laurie are shot through with uneven streaks of innocence, dressing Watching it is as magical and as frightening as driving down a back road, lost, in costumes, playacting as criminals. Life at the pitch of the masquerade. Suspen- feeling the presence of the unknown or the inevitable up ahead. sion of disbelief works in their favor. But the bullets are real. I left feeling no division between the film and the night outside. I found a film that Bart is courageous, fearless, only momentarily paralyzed at points of extreme wouldn’t end. I rode the subways for hours with no sense of direction or destina- cognitive dissonance. tion. No questioning or relishing the details, only sympathetically reverberating in shock. A one-way road of no return. Prone to nuance, compassion, bewilderment. As with some music, the striking of the notes is equal in importance to the reso- Laurie can be fearful and stern, baring her teeth, frothing into near ecstasy when nance and decay time. The haunted overhang. The ghost of the film took up per- armed pursuers fall away. They each have their scars and private commotions manent residency inside of me, lodged in memory singing darkly in my sleep. If but they share calamity and hope for impossibilities once closer than the moon, you examine the film closely not dispassionately, analytically it still sets the heart yet the moon evaporates. racing, it doesn’t crumble. It is exalted, magnified. L’Amour Fou. Transgression. Futility Hejira. The floating world. Damaged children let loose onto the shifting plates Evanescence under the surface of the earth. It all seems impossibly inventive and alive. The throwaway culture of American B-movies made films for the drive-in for the Bijou Not a nickel to buy fried onions in the time of hunger. Later flush enough to buy for the masses and the solitary mind capturing the imagination. We are taken a fur coat with marked bills. Shivering in boxcars then bursting through road- hostage by these that connect through action and refuse to disappear. blocks. The texture of life is velvet, then coarse and frayed. The texture of life This work is indestructible. Enduring minimal critical response and box office sea- a nebulous marsh, a mantle of returning childhood tucking you into bed, the soned by neglect, the films gain potency. Eventually the shared secret of this low- penalty zone of memory. Love lies exhausted in the reeds in the arms of panic budget sleeper Gun Crazy, once classified as neither classic norfilm maudit, rose and protection. The dream dies in the arms of the law. Laurie says, “We’re re- to rumors of its greatness and became a landmark, then a museum piece, part of ally in trouble this time.” Every scared child has spoken these words at some a canon. Nothing can defeat its voltage and its wild heart. Maybe that was al- point. We all have. We all return from points of no return. And then one time we ready happening by the time I saw the film in a renowned and dingy theater but don’t. Ghostly voices of childhood companions call out, confident searchlights in films like this feel like a discovery when you first see them whenever or wherever a natural obscurity that feels mythical and supernatural swallowed by the fog. you find them. They provide a refuge and a storm. You enter their world and it Breathless in apotheosis, the crooning love theme is now a surging crescendo of becomes yours. And you stick by them. And they stay with you for life. choral vocalise. The nebulous world falls away. Surpassing human contradiction, the film expires as the camera ascends. –Mark McElhatten Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. With Peggy Cummins, John Dall, Berry Kroeger 4 US 1950, 35mm, b/w, 87 min “The lovely to look at“ Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) makes her coruscat- ing entry guns blazing on a sideshow stage, twirling her pistols and swinging her hips, offering an act of virtuoso marksmanship and carnival burlesque. Sup- posedly trained in Brighton amusement parks and shooting galleries, Laurie is a magnetic and commanding lost soul. Her eyes catch Bart’s as he grins, ardently gazing at her with an astronomer’s leer. She fires a blank cartridge at him at close range. A funny valentine. An audacious theatrical come-on. Bart spasms in response to the pistol’s report. A challenge. The two spar and spark. Like a jazz cutting contest, an alchemical wedding. Laurie brands herself as a bad girl, a bad girl with the feeling she wants to be good. But she had a hair-trigger reflex, a compulsion to kill when cornered or pursued. Laurie is hypnotic. She has the equipment and proclivity to be sexually manipu- lative. She has cold ambition. She is mercurial with the ruthless survival instincts and the touch of sociopathy needed to embody the archetype or the stereotype of the noir . But she is in fact a great deal more com- plicated, more honest in her damages and yearning. She is not deceitful; she is on the level. Her most excessive moves are borne out of fear and panic. She carries an abyss inside of her. Laurie genuinely loves Bart and this makes all the difference in the world. Bart led astray becomes a strategic but reluctant criminal. He has no desire to cause harm. He commiserates with his victims. If anything he feels chronic empa- thy for everyone. Laurie’s embrace is meant to captivate, to enflame, to stifle anxiety, stifle lucidity, wreck his unerring compass of conscience. So she acts as a forcefield, a lure but also a medicine, narcotic and consoling. Bart may be a moth to the flame but he is also argumentative and enduringly strong. He cradles and protects Laurie in her weakest moments. Even when logic dictates they split up for a while to throw Joseph H. Lewis GUN CRAZY 12 bride-to-be possessed by a dark inner voice that compels her to violently reject and destroy her glit- tering debutante life by fleeing to the other side of the tracks and adapting a new but dangerously unstable identity. Especially effective in viscerally evoking the young woman’s struggle is the moody score by underappreciated Polish émigré Bronislau Kaper and the embittered inner voice hissed with demonic fury by radio actress turned noir vixen Au- drey Totter. Directed by Arch Oboler. With Phyllis Thaxter, Edmund Gwenn, Henry H. Daniels Jr. US 1945, 16mm, b/w, 65 min

saturday october 12 at 3pm HEAVEN WITH A BARBED WIRE FENCE Marking the screen debuts of both and Richard Conte (here Nicolas Conte), Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence was one of seven films helmed for 20th Century Fox by actor-turned-director Ri- cardo Cortez, brother of cinematographer Stanley Cortez. A gently rambling , Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence follows an optimistic dreamer Stuart Heisler AMONG THE LIVING Ricardo Cortez HEAVEN WITH A BARBED WIRE FENCE who quits his department store job to travel im- patiently West, by thumb and by rail, to Arizona, friday october 11 at 9pm PERSONS IN HIDING where a plot of land he purchased by mail waits Law enforcement czar J. Edgar Hoover cannily un- AMONG THE LIVING to be transformed into a farm. Along the way he Among the Living is prime . Twins, derstood the power of popular media to define the befriends Conte’s garrulous drifter and, more un- image of the federal bureau he effectively invented one who left town long ago and returns only for their expectedly, a Spanish Civil War exile played by father’s funeral, while the other is secretly locked and ruled for almost four decades. In the 1930s, serial-starlet , with beloved handlebar- Hoover turned to cinema as a publicity vehicle for away in the family mansion after being driven mad moustached character actor Raymond Walburn tag- by their mother’s screams for help. The latter will his FBI, working with the studios to transform stories ging along as an absentminded professor lending from the Bureau’s own files into gripping soon walk among the people of his town, a crea- a comic accent to the spontaneous group dialogue. ture too sensitive for a world where violence seems of crime and its swift punishment. Persons in Hiding Much of the pleasure of the film lies, in fact, in those is the first of four B-films made by Paramount under second nature and a mob the preferred way of scenes of the unlikely group bonding in freight cars community. One can only marvel at Stuart Heisler’s Hoover’s close supervision and based on successfully and beside hobo campfires, sharing their dreams closed FBI cases chronicled in his best-selling and genius. How elegantly he introduces a theme that and musings on life on the road. But darker forces would come to dominate his oeuvre, as evidenced by eponymous book. Boasting a co-written also gather around the edges of the film, with spec- by hard-boiled novelist Horace McCoy, Persons In The Biscuit Eater (1940), The Negro Soldier (1944) ters of Dust Bowl poverty and cruel threat- or Storm Warning (1951): that of worlds divided Hiding balances its careful exposé of police proce- ening to shatter the travelers’ hopes for greener, dure with a charged evocation of Depression-era (townsfolk having to watch the funeral through an more bucolic pastures. iron-wrought gate; the mad son being shushed away struggle, embodied in the figure of an embittered Directed by Ricardo Cortez. With Jean Rogers, Raymond Walburn, hairdresser who impulsively embraces crime and a into the mansion’s vast garden so as to not embar- rass the Decent People congregated for the burial); US 1939, 35mm, b/w, 62 min partnership with a petty hood as a means to obtain the way the estate is turned into a maze of shadows; the status symbols she invidiously desires. The fea- his interest in women that will later carry master- pieces like Smash-Up: the Story of a Woman (1947) or The Star (1952)—all ending with a deft tribute to ’s M after having taken a cue or two be- fore from ’s Frankenstein (both 1931), with sharp intelligence and wit. – Olaf Möller Directed by Stuart Heisler. With Albert Dekker, Susan Hayward, US 1941, 16mm, b/w, 67 min

BEWITCHED Bewitched is an audaciously stylized psychodrama that marked the keenly anticipated directorial de- but of Arch Oboler, a brilliant enfant terrible of whose popular horror series and scandalous Adam and Eve parody—with none other than Charlie McCarthy and Mae West in the biblical roles—earned him regular comparison with . Oboler accepted the inevitable invitation to Hollywood, where he worked success- fully as a before directing this striking adaptation of his own celebrated radio Alter Ego. “There are dark corners of the human mind we know nothing about” confesses an eminent psychia- trist, as Bewitched flashes back to study the strange symptoms of his most enigmatic patient, a beautiful Louis King PERSONS IN HIDING HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 13 ture debut of little-known B-starlet Patricia Morison, Persons In Hiding offers the farm-girl-turned-ruth- less-killer as an emblem of the criminality Hoover claimed lurked everywhere, even within the shadows of the American heartland. Directed by Louis King. With Lynne Overman, Patricia Morison, J. Carrol Naish US 1939, 16mm, b/w, 67 min saturday october 12 at 7pm STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR Shadows come cheap, so low-budget movies can af- ford to use them lavishly. In Stranger on the Third Floor, cinematographer weaves cages, webs, fractured mazes and looming silhou- ettes out of nothing but light and shade—an em- brace of German Expressionism that led first-time director Boris Ingster’s radically stylish B-thriller to be anointed the first American film noir. What starts as a conventional crime drama about a fresh-faced young reporter who witnesses a murder becomes a nightmare of mounting uncertainty, guilt and para- noia that shatters the seamless, well-balanced style of classical Hollywood. Upstaging the nondescript leads are noir icons who The Maltese Fal- cemented their status soon after in Budd Boetticher con: Elisha Cook Jr., whose single scene of pop-eyed hysteria launched his reign as king of the small-time using the verbal tools of his prolix trade. A seminal ther underscore the film’s place as an obscure antici- losers; and Peter Lorre, who injects pathos and gro- proto-noir, Blind Alley marks an important transi- pation of Hitchcock’s Spellbound. tesquerie into a role that asks him to do little besides tion between the classic gangster portrait films of Directed by . With Chester Morris, , Ann Dvorak scuttle around looking sinister in a telltale white scarf. the 1930s and the psychoanalytically informed ex- US 1939, 35mm, b/w, 68 min It is tempting to find the hand of Nathanael West, plorations of criminality that would flourish through who contributed uncredited screenplay revisions, in the end of the studio era. Indeed, the film sets into saturday october 12 at 9pm the film’s abandonment of the ’s comforting place dominant noir archetypes of psychotic crimi- THE STEEL HELMET clarity for the diffused guilt of noir. – Imogen Smith nality: analyst investigators and repressed dream/ A surprise critical and commercial hit that won Sam- Directed by Boris Ingster. With Peter Lorre, John McGuire, flashbacks as riddles charged with crucial- mean Margaret Tallichet uel Fuller a directorial contract with 20th Century US 1940, 35mm, b/w, 64 min ing. Despite the slightly starchy theatricality of its Fox, his first combat film was also the first Ameri- performances, the film is energized by the stylized can feature to depict the Korean War, released BLIND ALLEY direction of “the other Vidor,” Hungarian émigré while the and US Red Scare hysteria were Chiseled tough guy Chester Morris stars as a psy- Charles Vidor, whose prolific years in B-pictures furiously ablaze. Based on Fuller’s own war experi- chotic killer who hides out in a lakeside weekend have long been overshadowed by his other Freud- ence, The Steel Helmet vividly captures the confu- home, only to be locked in an extended fireside ian noir classic . Lucien Ballard’s apprenticeship sion of battle while also giving early expression to showdown with its owner, Ralph Bellamy’s tweedy as cinematographer for clearly the bravely critical gaze Fuller would cast upon the psychoanalyst, who determines to cure the criminal shaped the remarkable dream sequences that fur- American experience throughout his career. Shoot- ing largely in ’ Griffith Park on a minimal budget, Fuller plunges the viewer into the miasma of war with a taut and emotional intensity, guided by Gene Evans’ Sergeant Zack, a WWII “retread” and grizzled Everyman who regards everyone with the same unpitying honesty and anger. Wounded and abandoned deep behind enemy lines, the disori- ented sergeant seems to rise from the dead, lend- ing an oneiric quality to the wandering path that leads him to a precocious Korean war orphan and a ragged group of lost fellow soldiers, including an African American medic and wisecracking Nisei who together form a pointedly composite and complex image of America. Directed by Samuel Fuller. With Gene Evans, Robert Hutton, Steve Brodie US 1951, 35mm, b/w, 85 min

sunday october 13 at 7pm IT HAPPENED IN HOLLYWOOD An affectionate valentine to Tinseltown that nev- ertheless remains clear-eyed about the perils and strange paradoxes of stardom, It Happened in Hol- lywood was directed by the little-known post-Im- pressionist painter-turned-director Harry Lachman, Harry Lachman IT HAPPENED IN HOLLYWOOD but is better recognized as a striking expression of 14 Samuel Fuller’s first Hollywood career as a success- discovered as a cult classic, drew ful and always brilliantly imaginative screenwriter. the attention of Columbia executives who began to Perennial tough guy Richard Dix is wonderfully cast unsuccessfully groom Lewis for bigger-budget as- as a silent cowboy star whose oversized heart gives signments that he would steadfastly resist out of re- him trouble when his career plummets with the ar- luctance to surrender the creative freedom he found rival of sound, and he can no longer keep his pledge on the lower rungs of the hierarchical studio ladder. to a sickly young fan he had once invited to his now- Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. With Steven Geray, Micheline Cheirel, lost cattle ranch. A standout climactic scene of a pic- Eugene Borden nic staged with actual stand-ins for the stars casts an US 1946, DCP, b/w, 71 min ersatz W.C. Fields and , among others, for a remarkable, almost Surrealist, gag that also saturday october 26 at 7pm gives touching homage to the Dream Factory’s un- sunday november 10 at 4pm sung workers. Only Fuller could have invented the THUNDERHOOF film’s eccentrically twisting plot that speaks with un- In the first stage of his long career, cult noir director expected wit and poignancy about the fragile lives Phil Karlson thrived as a contract helmer of inven- of actors washed up by the ever-shifting tides of tive B-films in a wide variety of : from service Hollywood caprice. comedies and musicals to minor entries in the Charlie Directed by Harry Lachman. With Richard Dix, Fay Wray, Victor Kilian Chan and Boys series. Among Karlson’s best US 1937, 35mm, b/w, 67 min early works is the strangely forgotten Thunderhoof, a psychosexually intense Western that succinctly presages his later, and now justly celebrated, studies Remembered today for his prominent roles in The of strained masculinity (, The Brothers Magnificent Ambersons and The Treasure of the Sierra Rico). Thunderhoof is admirably resourceful, mak- Madre, was better known during his career Reginald Le Borg WEIRD WOMAN ing the most of a cast of just four actors, including as the popular star of more than forty B-Westerns the titular steed, an elusive wild horse pursued with made at RKO, cast by Welles and Huston precisely friday october 18 at 9pm obsessive doggedness by an aging cowboy, played because of his upstanding cowboy persona. Holt’s sunday october 20 at 4pm with grizzled intensity by an alternately avuncu- boyish and likeable screen presence made him an MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS lar and wrathful . Dragged along on ideal replacement for RKO’s earlier Western star, B-film maverick Joseph H. Lewis delivered a low-rent Foster’s hunt for his White Whale are the cowboy’s the chivalrous George O’Brien, and allowed him to yet brilliantly stylized reply to and Gaslight too-young Mexican wife and a hotshot wrangler glide across the melding of violent action-adventure, starring a sensitive , in her debut role, as and adopted son now increasingly resentful of comedy and song that remained a standard a young woman abducted to a seaside mansion to strained filial bond to a man he is coming to despise. formula of Holt’s often compelling oaters. Only the play the role of an already dead woman and victim Channeling the Freudian and patricidal undercur- second of Holt’s RKO Westerns, The Fargo Kid mines of a sinister scheme. With as a rents reinventing the postwar Western, Thunderhoof a more comedic vein than other entries, following knife-wielding psychotic man-child and Dame May wastes none of its short running time in ratcheting up Holt as a wandering cowpoke mistaken for a noto- Whitty as his coddling elderly mother, My Name is the tension as the men quickly lock into a paranoid rious gunslinger without his even noticing, until it is Julia Ross releases the Gothic spirits of the Forties competition that, in Hawksian fashion, increasingly almost too late. In the role of Holt’s friend is country woman-trapped-in-an-old-house cycle into a brisk conflates horse and bride. songwriter and singer Ray Whitley who wrote the thriller animated by comically irreverent touches. Directed by Phil Karlson. With Preston Foster, Mary Stuart, William famous Western ballad made immortal by Gene True to its boldly assertive title, My Name is Julia US 1948, 35mm, b/w, 77 min Autry, “Back in the Saddle Again,” and remained a Ross flaunts the rich potential of the B-film to act as a staple of the singing cowboy films. revealingly distorting mirror of the more predictable RIDE LONESOME Directed by . With Tim Holt, Emmett Lynn, Jane Drummond big-budgeted A-films. Indeed, scenes of Foch pull- The seven Westerns Boetticher made with Randolph US 1940, 16mm, b/w, 63 min ing apart the wall panels and staircases to discover Scott—the famous Ranown Cycle—mostly produced secret passages seem to subversively celebrate the by Harry Joe Brown and written by threadbare sets of Lewis’ low-budget production. An in the short span of four years, are as many varia- unexpected breakout hit, the film was so popular tions on the lonely hero. One could say that, in Ride it was elevated by Columbia to an A-feature and Lonesome, Ben Brigade’s loneliness is the monolithic moved to the prestigious top half of double bills. embodiment of revenge, engaged in a pursuit that will lead to one of the most disenchanted endings of Directed by Joseph H. Lewis. With Nina Foch, May Whitty, George Macready the entire cycle. His quest is a mythical one: a quest US 1945, 35mm, b/w, 64 min for fire that will finally purge his past only to leave him lonelier. And, as in all seven films, Scott wears SO DARK THE NIGHT the same mineral mask, like the sculptural dry One of the great delights of the B-film is that rare landscape in which the film unfolds. His invisibility is chance to see a favorite character actor elevated systematically betrayed by a physical (though ethe- to a starring role, like menacing tough guy Charles real) element: dust—as if his pursuit of revenge is McGraw’s transformation into a bulletproof cop in charted by a trail of dust. And dust will finally turn , or Hungarian émigré Steven to smoke: in another scene, bodies are buried in a Geray, the suave maître d’ and waiter in countless cloud of dust; a tracking shot discovers, behind the pictures, now cast as a Parisian detective whose en- funeral party, the dark smoke of the Mescalero’s gagement to a small-town innkeeper’s daughter is war signs. From dust to smoke, the last shot—rising shattered by her gruesome murder. Determined to on a film crane—is of the burning hanging tree’s catch the killer, Geray embarks on a strange and dark smoke climbing up to the sky, fleeing up - to twisting path, interrogating subjects while his crimi- wards heaven. – João Pedro Rodrigues nal prey remains always one step away. In this styl- Directed by Budd Boetticher. With , Karen Steele, ish follow-up to his breakthrough hit, the Gothic plot- Pernell Roberts twister My Name is Julia Ross, Joseph H. Lewis makes US 1959, DCP, color, 73 min clear his wild talent for the unexpected stories and bold mise-en-scène that give his films the giddy in- Joseph H. Lewis MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS tensity so beloved by true cinephiles. Regularly re- HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 15 Tribute should also be paid to ’s perfor- mance in the minute-and-a-half or so of footage (shot by Wood for another project that was aban- doned after the actor’s death in 1956) the filmmaker salvaged for Plan 9. In what looks like an absolute vacuum of plot context, Lugosi uses all the resourc- es at his command to impose a last double image of himself: grieving, hapless widower and Satanic overlord, proud in ignoble defeat. – Chris Fujiwara Directed by Edward D. Wood Jr. With Gregory Walcott, Mona McKinnon, Duke Moore US 1959, 35mm, b/w, 80 min

friday november 1 at 7pm WEIRD WOMAN The long-running radio serial Inner Sanctum Mystery (1941 – 1952) inspired six Universal films, all star- ring Lon Chaney Jr. and featuring eerie stories of supernatural terror. In the best one, Weird Woman, Chaney is Norman Reed, an anthropology profes- sor married to the exotic island native he met while conducting field research for a book on voodoo re- ligions. Austrian émigré Reginald Le Borg lends an ironically anthropological eye to his cutting study of THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK a small-minded American town destabilized by the nologist performing dangerous experiments upon a incestuous rivalries and unspoken xenophobia that gorilla stolen from the circus, using vital organs re- ignite when Reed unexpectedly returns from his ex- moved from female patients to transform pedition with his comely bride in tow. Remaining true into a beautiful woman whose strange predilection Weird Woman to its radio origins, makes effective towards wild animals ultimately reveals her true use of voiceovers to place the viewer squarely in identity. Played by a Native American or African the troubled mindset of Reed as he struggles to un- American actress whose origins remain uncertain saturday october 26 at 10pm derstand the many weird women who whisper sug- but who was claimed in studio ballyhoo to be “The gestively into his ear, including the always uncanny Venezuelan Volcano” best known by the stage name It may be impossible to extricate Edward D. Wood Val Lewton regular Elizabeth Russell as a wrathfully of Acquanetta, the gorilla-woman is as uncomfort- Jr.’s too-famous film from the noxious mixture of vengeful wife desperate to blame someone for her ably blatant an emblem of racist fears as King Kong mock awe, real awe, familiarity and condescension husband’s suicide. years earlier. Intertwining the doctor’s increasingly in which it has lain floating since it was rediscovered Directed by Reginald Le Borg. With Lon Chaney Jr., Anne Gwynne, dangerous experiments with the perilous work of (as, supposedly, one of the worst movies ever made) US 1944, 16mm, b/w, 63 min the animal trainer taming vicious lions, Captive Wild not long after its author’s miserable death in 1978. Woman channeled the fad for sexualized jungle ex- If anything still remains to be said about Plan 9 From CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN otica into a surprise box office hit. Outer Space, perhaps it’s that the film manages to Before his best-known film noir and his controver- Directed by Edward Dmytryk. With , Evelyn Ankers, pull itself together and make an almost coherent sially brief turn as one of the blacklisted Hollywood Acquanetta (if insane) statement, even though its various parts Ten, Edward Dmytryk was an editor-turned-director US 1943, 35mm, b/w, 60 min always seem to be trying to separate from one an- steadily working his way across different studios’ B- other: the nonexistent sets; the assortment of profes- units. Dmytryk’s journeyman years included a stint at friday november 1 at 9pm sional, quasi-professional, and nonprofessional ac- Universal, where he helmed this eccentric sci-fi hor- SH! THE OCTOPUS tors; Wood’s fervent, crackpot dialogue. ror starring John Carradine as an unethical endocri- Standing foursquare among the towering achieve- ments of world cinema, Sh! The Octopus transcends mere words. Director William C. McGann shows his inventiveness from the start, daring to place Hugh Herbert and Allen Jenkins into starring roles, fully confident they can carry a feature as easily as Cagney or Flynn. Next, he boldly confines most of the action to a single, cramped set—a lighthouse interior—compelling his cast to make dynamic act- ing choices in the most restrictive of conditions. His most audacious move is to keep the Octopus off- screen much of the time—a touch famously ripped off by such later, inferior films asCat People and The Thing. Finally, he brings it all in at a taut 54 minutes, ensuring there won’t even be the slightest whiff of padding; it can scarcely be summarized here, but it involves a pair of cops, a mystery woman, a corpse and, of course, an Irish police commissioner. Released as a huge Christmas present to an America still ris- ing from the Depression, it was hailed by Variety as “so feeble even the actors look ashamed of them- selves… the studio should be willing to call it quits after this.” If motion pictures are indeed the world’s Edward D. Wood PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE greatest art form, then Sh! The Octopus is truly the 16 pinnacle; after seeing it, you’ll stagger out of the friday november 8 at 9pm theatre, secure in the belief you have reached out ARMORED CAR ROBBERY and touched the face of God. – Michael Schlesinger Armored Car Robbery is just one in a series of vio- Directed by William C. McGann. With Hugh Herbert, Allen Jenkins, lent crime dramas directed with crisp efficiency by Marcia Ralston during his early years at RKO. US 1937, 16mm, b/w, 54 min An important first expression of the genre THE DEVIL BAT held at bay by the crumbling Hays Code—which Almost hard to watch except when mad doctor Bela had long prohibited overly detailed depictions of Lugosi or his mutant bats are on screen, and padded criminal acts—Armored Car Robbery came out the to an unforgivable extent by scenes in which ama- same year as ’s seminal expression of teur detectives and potential victims stand around the genre, , yet stands in stark, the set wondering about mysteries whose answers stripped-down contrast to Huston’s soulful peon to have been known to the viewer from the beginning, the defeated underdog. Fleischer instead delivers The Devil Bat is at once less effective than it should a swift and coldblooded illustration of ruthlessly be as a low-grade horror film and more effective efficient police and criminal apparatuses set into than any film needs to be as an absurdist condemna- contrapuntal motion, with William Talman’s harder- tion of human fatuousness. The stupidity of the char- than- mastermind pitted against indel- acters is so total, and the characters themselves so ible character actors only possible in the feverish irritating, that Lugosi and his campaign of revenge trenches of B-film production. Making great use of seem completely justified. Los Angeles-area locations, the film bears affinities with the popular cycle of low-budget semi-documen- The contribution of , here making his tary crime films that flourished in the late 1940s and second feature film as director, is not very distin- early 1950s. guished, but more committed or more imaginative Directed by Richard Fleischer. With Charles McGraw, Adele Jergens, direction would hardly have made a difference to William Talman the film. The Devil Bat belongs to, and exists solely US 1950, 35mm, b/w, 67 min for and because of, Lugosi. On a downward career spiral from which he would never manage to re- bound, the former star of Dracula compensates him- self for the ignominy of appearing in this pathetic DR. BROADWAY little production by wringing each of his scenes by the neck and acting everyone else off the screen. dependent producer, director and screenwriter, she – Chris Fujiwara created a number of low-budget fo- Directed by Jean Yarbrough. With Bela Lugosi, Suzanne Kaaren, cused on women and how women confront the moral Dave O’Brien vigor of society. Recently preserved by Paramount US 1940, 16mm, b/w, 69 min Pictures, Outrage is the second feature by Lupino— she was not credited for her debut Not Wanted sunday november 3 at 5pm (1949). OUTRAGE Set during the postwar period, Ann Walton—played Best known as an actress, Ida Lupino was also an by Mala Powers—is a modern young woman work- accomplished, daring filmmaker. In 1949 she estab- ing in an office in a small town. When leaving one lished, with her then-husband Collier Young, the pro- night she is followed by a man. The long, tense chase duction company The Filmakers, which offered her scene—a magistral sequence—is charged with dis- the freedom to develop her own projects. As an in- turbing emotional violence. Ashamed and trauma- Joe May JOHNNY DOESN'T LIVE HERE ANYMORE tized, she cannot speak about what happened and runs away from her parents’ home to start a new life. Dealing with how society faces gender inequali- THE ty, harassment and sexual assault, Outrage confronts The final result of the film represents what I thought at subjects that, at that point, remained largely unad- the time was the crowning moment of my style. I had dressed. – Gustavo Beck finally found it and was able to bring it to the screen the way I wanted. – Richard Fleischer Directed by Ida Lupino. With Mala Powers, Tod Andrews, Robert Clarke US 1950, 35mm, b/w, 75 min Compression and forward momentum were key to many of the strongest RKO film noir titles. Fleischer friday november 8 at 7pm was master of the fleet and compact as demon- THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK strated by this highly celebrated noir shot in thirteen My favorite Peter Lorre movie, and that’s saying a days for 230,000 dollars, running an energizing 71 lot (and he’s the star too!). It’s brisk and unpredict- minutes. After a string of impressive secondary roles able, always zigzagging from genre to genre. The (in Siodmak’s The Killers and Mann’s T-Men) Fleischer tale starts out like Kafka’s Amerika, with a wide- elevated the charismatically gruff Charles McGraw eyed immigrant, our Lorre, on a liner cruising past to his first starring role in Armored Car Robbery. In the Statue of Liberty, on his way to unforeseeable , McGraw’s detective Sgt. Brown opportunities in the West. Lorre plays the new Amer- begrudgingly accepts the assignment to safeguard ican with a succession of acting styles that permute a racketeer’s widow as she makes a furtive journey as rapidly as the film’s careening genres, which by train out of Chicago. Destination: Los Angeles, freely shift the cadences from coming- where she will testify before a Grand Jury unless a of-age narrative to , romantic bullet stops her cold. The train is a steam-powered fairytale and even revenge , all the while de- traveling theater of masquerades and fluctuating fining a nation. It’s a B-movie wonder! – appearances, unidentified syndicate killers and Directed by Robert Florey. With Peter Lorre, , unlikely allies. Under police watch is the serrated Richard Fleischer THE NARROW MARGIN US 1941, 35mm, b/w, 69 min “Queen of the Bs” , a sultry, short- HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 17 fused fireball of caustic complaint, strategically rub- bing up against the flinty McGraw with frictive, hos- tile sparks. Spilling her string of pearls, jabbing with acid barbs, defiantly blaring music on her portable phonograph, Windsor’s every move is a provocation that teases catastrophe. Fleischer and the great cinematographer George E. Diskant make the most of the lively balance be- tween the interior design of the train and the ex- ternal landscape, conceiving of multi-plane effects, oscillating viewpoints and natural superimpositions within a tight space. Without a doubt, the story that unfolds and the vocal interplay between the actors is riveting . But try watching the film silent sometime. You will see the fantastic choreog- raphy of figures, modulating light, kinetic cuts, dis- solves, wipes, pivoting motion and quick changing impressions. Every great is first a great in the editing and The Narrow Margin is a tour de force. New print courtesy the Academy Film Archive. Directed by Richard Fleischer. With Charles McGraw, Marie Windsor, Robert Florey Jacqueline White US 1952, 35mm, b/w, 71 min eyed soldier, the film also marks the sadly ignomini- the crime by posing as a producer determined to ous end of Viennese émigré director Joe May’s once bring the same ill-fated play back to life, in the saturday november 9 at 7pm meteoric career. same now-shuttered theater and with the remaining DR. BROADWAY Directed by Joe May. With Simone Simon, , William Terry cast. McHugh seems to be onto something when the Anthony Mann’s debut feature is a brisk mystery- US 1944, 16mm, b/w, 74 min substitute lead is also killed, suggesting that some- comedy that follows Macdonald Carey as a phy- one in the cast might be guilty. sician whose office along the Great White Way sunday november 17 at 5pm Directed by Joe May. With , Irene Hervey, Dorothy Arnold makes him an unlikely savior and sleuth of the help- THE HOUSE OF FEAR US 1939, 35mm, b/w, 66 min less victims and strange mysteries that land on his Joe May injected madcap comedy into his breezy doorstep… or on nearby high building ledges. It remake of Paul Leni’s innovative 1928 part-talkie sunday november 17 at 7pm is there that he rescues a young woman seemingly The Last Warning, updating and adding new twists friday november 22 at 9pm about to commit suicide, and then promptly hires her to the whodunnit tale of a theater haunted by the DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI as his secretary and assistant on his improbable first ghost of a lead actor mysteriously killed on stage. Among the most fascinating and exciting Hollywood case, tracking down the missing daughter of an ex- May’s background in theater informed The House of films starring pathbreaking Chinese-American- ac gangster who he long ago sent to jail. When the Fear’s evocative rendition of the backstage mayhem tress is Daughter of Shanghai, doctor is accused of the ex-con’s murder the stakes and butterfly-filled dressing rooms. Lead actor Wil- a revelation of the B-film’s potential to challenge are dramatically raised. Meant to be the first of liam Gargan, meanwhile, brought his own pre-acting dominant rules of studio-era Hollywood. In this case a character-based series, Dr. Broadway is a giddy career as a gumshoe into his role as Arthur McHugh, we find casting conventions overturned with Wong and delightful rollercoaster of a film that packs an intrepid police detective convinced he can solve as a vengeful daughter paired with Korean-Amer- more plot into its short running time than it probably ican actor as a federal agent. They are should. Despite Mann’s impressive ability to weave joined together in a mission to uncover a vicious hu- together the crazy storylines while maintaining a man smuggling ring victimizing Chinese immigrants. nail-biting tension, Dr. Broadway did not convince French émigré filmmaker Robert Florey was good Paramount to invest in further adventures. friends with both Wong and Ahn, and worked hard Directed by Anthony Mann. With Macdonald Carey, Jean Phillips, J. Carrol Naish to secure them sympathetic and more fully dimen- US 1942, 35mm, b/w, 68 min sional roles than were typical in the 1930s for non- white stars. Although shot on an accelerated sched- sunday november 10 at 7pm ule with a minimal budget, Florey’s signature stylistic JOHNNY DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE flair and outspokenness is everywhere apparent in Daughter of Shanghai, most especially in its pointed This little-known Monogram comedy is a delightful critique of the injustices regularly suffered by Asian entry in the short cycle of housing shortage comedies Americans, including the racist stereotypes the film inspired by the rush of factory workers to already so clearly rejects. Preserved by the Library of Con- crowded urban centers during the Second World gress. War. Giving comedic form to period anxieties about single and empowered women newly entered into Directed by Robert Florey. With Anna May Wong, Philip Ahn, Charles Bickford the labor force, Johnny Doesn’t Live Here Anymore US 1937, 35mm, b/w, 63 min stars Simone Simon as Kathie, an aircraft factory worker whose arrival in the Big City and prompt PHANTOM OF CHINATOWN displacement from her promised sublet unleashes In response to 20th Century Fox’s eminently popular a dizzying comedy of mistaken identity and errant Charlie Chan, Monogram invented the deprecia- desire. The film follows Kathie as she deftly fends tory Chinese master sleuth Mr. Wong, played in five off prowling servicemen and adjusts to her new life, films by the versatile Boris Karloff. The last of the all the while accompanied by a wacky Mel Blanc- Mr. Wong series broke radically from the formula voiced gremlin sprinkling pixie dust havoc around by replacing Karloff with the talented Keye Luke, her. Remembered today, if at all, for the brief ap- the Chinese-American actor locked into the role of pearance of a youthful as a sleepy- Edgar G. Ulmer STRANGE ILLUSION Chan’s “Number One Son” but now freed to solve 18 an enigmatic crime of his own: the murder of his col- lege mentor, a prominent archaeologist killed while lecturing about his controversial discovery of a leg- endary ancient Chinese tomb. Arguably the most progressive of the many Asian detective films popu- lar throughout the B-era, Phantom of Chinatown be- gins with a remarkable critique of the ethnographic gaze shown in the expedition footage presented by the professor just before his death, as if to under- score the film’s refreshing casting of Asian American actors as protagonists. Joining forces with Luke is Japanese-American actress Lotus Long as a patriotic secret Chinese agent assigned to recover the pre- cious scroll pillaged from the sacred tomb. Eccentric comic accents liven the pace and sharpen the film’s sly parody of racial stereotyping, best expressed in the ludicrous fortune cookie dialogue deadpanned by Luke as he weaves his way through the Chinatown underworld. Directed by Phil Rosen. With Keye Luke, Lotus Long, Grant Withers US 1941, 16mm, b/w, 61 min friday november 22 at 7pm William Castle WHEN STRANGERS MARRY STRANGE ILLUSION Shakespeare is given the Hardy Boys treatment by way (who inherited the Falcon role from his brother day that snake in silk underwear is going to find Edgar Ulmer in his liberal transformation of Hamlet George Sanders), is imperturbable and immaculate her neck in a sling!” predicts one of the sisters, and into an All-American college freshman home from and trivializes everything. The film doesn’t so much quite correctly when Paula’s brutal murder leaves school who is inspired by weird nightmares to inves- overturn this structure as explore it from a female the remaining inductees, together with their ma- tigate the mysterious death of his father, the town’s point of view. Always a mild and restrained actor, tronly chaperone, stranded in the sorority’s moun- prominent judge. Among the legendary Poverty Row Conway disappears into the film even more than tain lodge wondering who among them committed studio Producers Releasing Company’s more ambi- usual. After it is over, it’s hard to remember him, as if the crime they all not-so-secretly desired. Buoyed tious projects, Strange Illusion was originally intend- he hadn’t been in it, as if it had been a film entirely by a spirited cast donning competing heart-shape ed for Joseph H. Lewis but ultimately assigned to of women. – Chris Fujiwara beehive hairdos and including Anita Louise (briefly), the equally adept stylist Ulmer, who released ample Nina Foch and Evelyn Keyes, Nine Girls is laced with fog and modernist angles to give eerie atmospher- Directed by William Clemens. With , Jean Brooks, Rita Corday US 1943, 16mm, b/w, 67 min deliciously catty repartee adapted from the origi- ics to the film, beginning with its evocative dream nal play by Karen DeWolf and Connie Lee, regular sequence opening. NINE GIRLS for Columbia’s popular Blondie series. The rarely acknowledged Leigh Jason was a tal- A clear extension of his leading role as a Boy Scout Directed by Leigh Jason. With Ann Harding, Evelyn Keyes, detective in Paramount’s popular Henry Aldrich se- ented and prolific director of B-musicals and com- US 1944, 16mm, b/w, 78 min ries, Jimmy Lydon’s Hamlet conveys a wide-eyed edies at RKO and Columbia before continuing with equal success in television. Nine Girls is a wonderful naiveté that cuts almost subversively against the saturday november 23 at 9pm place to start a critical reevaluation: a brisk and feverishly Gothic Freudianism percolating through- KID GLOVE KILLER out Strange Illusion. Meanwhile, the perennial villain sly comedy-murder-mystery set among a small-town college sorority whose most prominent member is The B-film’s important role as a lower-risk stage for lends his trademark lecherousness testing new talent is showcased in the striking direc- to the film’s Claudius, determined at all costs to se- the vituperative Paula, a spoiled socialite whose fang marks scar each of the other members. “Some- torial debut of Austrian émigré and duce and destroy the wife of the judge and uber-fa- the first starring role for Van Heflin. A taut police ther-figure who once convicted him.35mm preserva- procedural, Kid Glove Killer was an expansion of tion print courtesy UCLA Film and Television Archive. an episode from MGM’s long-running shorts series Directed by Edgar G. Ulmer. With Jimmy Lydon, Warren William, Crime Does Not Pay, two-reeler cautionary tales that US 1945, 35mm, b/w, 87 min traced the birth, evolution and successful extermina- tion by a police agency of a wide range of crimi- nal activities and enterprises, from drunk driving saturday november 23 at 7pm and embezzlement to counterfeiting and smuggling. THE FALCON AND THE CO-EDS Here Van Heflin is a wisecracking and casually sexist The Falcon and the Co-eds is the best of the films forensic criminologist pitted against a corrupt District in the Falcon series because it has the least to do Attorney and rival for the affection of his lab assis- with the Falcon, instead focusing on several female tant Marsha Hunt, who suddenly finds herself caught characters. The touch of Val Lewton screenwriter Ar- in the middle of a tense cat-and-mouse game. Writ- del Wray is undoubtedly decisive in giving the film er John C. Higgins imparts Kid Glove Killer with rich its strong Lewtonesque flavor, to which the main-title details of forensic crime work that point towards his music, lifted from ’s score for I Walked efficient screenplays for Anthony With a Zombie, and the recurrence of a seashore Mann (T-Men, He Walked By Night, Border Incident). location from that film, also contribute, as does the Directed by Fred Zinnemann. With Van Heflin, Marsha Hunt, Lee Bowman casting of Jean Brooks and Isabel Jewell (previously US 1942, 16mm, b/w, 74 min teamed in both The Leopard Man and ). sunday november 24 at 4pm The Falcon films constantly assert that woman is in- WHEN STRANGERS MARRY (AKA BETRAYED) comprehensible and ever apt to make mountains Orson Welles was an outspoken admirer of this com- out of molehills; man, as incarnated by Tom Con- Leigh Jason NINE GIRLS pact B-noir classic by William Castle (later an as- HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 19 sistant director on The Lady From Shanghai), a taut and suspenseful sixty-seven-minute story of a nubile bride arriving in to meet the trav- eling salesman she recently and very hastily mar- ried before his abrupt and, in retrospect, strange departure. In her hotel she finds not her husband but, by uncanny coincidence, an old flame crestfallen to learn of her spontaneous marriage, a forgiving but oddly brooding type played by Robert Mitchum in a pivotal early role that first revealed his talents as an ambiguous hero. Together the bride and ex- lover search for the missing groom, discovering clues along the way that suggest he may be the ruthless “Silk Stocking Murderer.” The film offered an early role for a radiantly young Kim Hunter, who wanders through a haunted city of beckoning signs and sin- ister figures like a noir Alice in Underworld Land. An arresting scene of the frightened, lonely Hunter, alone in her dingy hotel room while honky-tonk music and pulsing lights beckon, mysteriously unfolds like an animated Edward Hopper canvas. Directed by William Castle. With Dean Jagger, Kim Hunter, Robert Mitchum US 1944, 16mm, b/w, 67 min

THE MARK OF THE WHISTLER Norman Foster WOMAN ON THE RUN Not long after the debut of the popular radio mys- tery series The Whistler, Columbia launched a se- complete with giant flaming shish kebabs and knife- best place to launch a reevaluation of Foster is the ries of adaptations, seven starring veteran actor wielding dancers. rediscovered noir thriller Woman on the Run, star- Richard Dix as a disoriented everyman caught in a ring as an estranged wife searching self-destructive spiral and mysteriously accompa- Directed by William Castle. With Richard Dix, Janis Carter, Porter Hall US 1944, 16mm, b/w, 60 min for her embittered artist husband-in-hiding after he nied by the sardonic, almost sinister, commentary is targeted by the mob for accidently witnessing a of the unseen whistling host taking obvious pleasure crime. Joining Sheridan in her rescue mission through in the inevitable downfall and punishment of Dix’s monday november 25 at 7pm the urban underbelly is Dennis O’Keefe’s strangely sad-sack antiheroes. Co-scripted by the great Cor- RAW DEAL insistent crime reporter who may have alternate mo- nell Woolrich, The Mark of the Whistler follows Dix Is Raw Deal the most beautiful “ménage à trois” in all tives. Woman on the Run makes stunning use of its as a fallen man reaching for a fallen star, a park- film history? The late João Bénard da Costa, fond of and Los Angeles locations to inject a bench derelict who happens upon an improbable superlatives, would have called it “un-adjectivable.” vérité energy and palpable danger into its gripping scheme to impersonate the owner of an unclaimed Pat () loves Joe (Dennis O’Keefe) who story, including a thrilling roller coaster climax shot bank account advertised in a local paper. The film loves Ann (Marsha Hunt) who hates Pat who envies on the Santa Monica pier by pioneering cinematog- was the second in the schadenfreude series directed Ann who loves Joe who trusts Pat… One gener- rapher Hal Mohr, who across his long career refined by William Castle, whose trademark stylistic gusto ally remembers Anthony Mann’s noir films for their dollies and cranes to make possible a richer kind of and vaudevillian flair is wonderfully evident in the cinematography and mise-en-scène. John Alton’s expressive camera movement. boldly homoerotic close-up showdowns that give al- black-and-white images are indeed remarkable. The precise and elaborate cutting, always relying Directed by Norman Foster. With Ann Sheridan, Dennis O’Keefe, most comic tension to Dix’s dangerous game, not to Robert Keith mention the over-the-top Cossack-themed nightclub on depth of field, shot/counter-shot, surprisingly ef- US 1950, 35mm, b/w, 77 min ficient compositions, is a marvel shot after shot. The images are often almost abstract, belonging to and moving away from the plot (eventually leading to Pat and the unstoppable clock inside the ship), be- coming iconic by themselves. But what touches me most is Claire Trevor’s deep, whispered voice draw- ing us into the film and past the prison gate in the tense opening scene (No trespassing—she shouldn’t have crossed that gate and if she hadn’t, the film would have taken another turn, as her rival Ann so desires), catching us inside her mind, as if she were writing the very film unfolding before us. – João Rui Guerra da Mata Directed by Anthony Mann. With Dennis O’Keefe, Claire Trevor, Marsha Hunt US 1948, 35mm, b/w, 79 min

WOMAN ON THE RUN Typically dismissed as a minor director whose best work was as assistant to Orson Welles, the talent- ed Norman Foster had a significant career unto his own that began with his work directing some of the best entries in the Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto series, but also included a group of accomplished Spanish Anthony Mann RAW DEAL language genre films made in Mexico. Perhaps the 20 SEPTEMBER 2019 S M T W T F S 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 7PM 3PM HYENAS P. 3 THE LITTLE GIRL WHO SOLD ... / LE FRANC P. 3 9PM $5 matinee admission HYENAS P. 3 7PM HYENAS P. 3 9PM TOUKI BOUKI P. 4 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 4:30PM 7PM 7PM 7PM HYENAS P. 3 HYENAS P. 3 DETOUR P. 6 CRIME WAVE FIVE CAME BACK P. 7 PLUNDER ROAD P. 7 7PM TOUKI BOUKI P. 4 9:15PM 9:45PM DONOVAN’S BRAIN P. 7 ISLAND OF DOOMED MEN P. 7

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 5PM 7PM 6:30PM 8PM 3PM MAISON DU BONHEUR MS SLAVIC 7 A CONVERSATION WITH LIVE! SUPA MODO P. 4 P. 24 VESLEMØY’S SONG P. 24 GODFREY REGGIO AND at the orpheum theatre $5 matinee admission 7PM sofia bohdanowicz and DETOUR P. 6 in person at wbur cityspace 7PM FIVE CAME BACK P. 7 ANIMA MUNDI P. 27 godfrey reggio in person

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 3:30PM 7PM 7PM 7PM CRIME WAVE THE LEOPARD MAN P. 7 FLEURS SAUVAGES EXAMEN D’ETAT P. 29 PLUNDER ROAD P. 7 THE GHOST SHIP P. 8 WILDFLOWERS 9PM COLOR CORRECTION P. 28 7PM MURDER BY CONTRACT margaret honda in conversa- P. 8 PRIVACY CAMPAIGN tion with henriette huldisch godfrey reggio in person P. 27 29 30 7PM 7PM LADIES IN WAITING HORSE MONEY P. 31 ATALAKU P. 29

Charles Vidor BLIND ALLEY P. 14 THE ELEPHANT MAN P. 33 HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 21 OCTOBER 2019 S M T W T F S 01 02 03 04 05 7PM 3PM KINSHASA MAKAMBO GOOD BYE, LENIN! P. 4 P. 30 $5 matinee admission dieudo hamadi in person 7PM MAMA COLONEL P. 30 dieudo hamadi in person

06 07 08 09 10 11 12 5PM 7PM 7PM 3PM BABES ON SWING STREET VITALINA VERALA P. 30 GUN CRAZY P. 10 HEAVEN WITH A BARBED... P. 8 pedro costa in person PERSONS IN HIDING P. 13 9PM 7PM AMONG THE LIVING 7PM THE MAN THEY COULD BEWITCHED P. 13 NOT HANG P. 8 STRANGER...THIRD FLOOR THE CRIME OF DR. CRESPI BLIND ALLEY P. 14 P. 9 9PM THE STEEL HELMET P. 14 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 4:30PM 7PM 7PM 7PM GUN CRAZY P. 10 EVIDENCE P. 32 SWIMMING POOL P. 35 VISITORS P. 27 7PM 9PM 9PM IT HAPPENED IN MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS HOLLYWOOD P. 14 SO DARK THE NIGHT P. 15 THE MAGIC LAND OF THE FARGO KID P. 15 MOTHER GOOSE P. 33

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 4PM 7PM 7PM 3PM MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS BY THE GRACE OF GOD P. 33 POLTERGEIST P. 5 SO DARK THE NIGHT P. 15 P. 36 $5 matinee admission françois ozon in person 9PM 7PM BODY DOUBLE P. 33 7PM REDCAP... THUNDERHOOF THE WIND IS DRIVING HIM RIDE LONESOME P. 15 TOWARDS THE OPEN SEA P. 37 10PM PLAN 9... P. 16

27 28 29 30 31 The Archive is extremely grateful to June Yip, 5PM 7PM 9PM REDCAP... DAVID BROOKS ALIENS P. 38 AB ‘85, and David Wong, AB ‘85, for their THE WIND IS DRIVING HIM SHORT FILMS P. 37 generous support of the Harvard Film Archive’s TOWARDS THE OPEN SEA ongoing visiting filmmaker program. Thanks to P. 37 their generosity the Archive is able to continue 7PM inviting filmmakers, artists and scholars to pres- LISTEN UP PHILIP P. 32 ent their work at the HFA and interact with the Harvard film community.

Godfrey Reggio NAQOYQATSI P. 27 Margaret Honda COLOR CORRECTION P. 28 22 NOVEMBER 2019 S M T W T F S 01 02 7PM 7PM WEIRD WOMAN THE ELEPHANT MAN P. 33 CAPTIVE WILD WOMAN introduction by alex ross perry P. 16 9:30PM 9PM PATTY HEARST P. 34 SH! THE OCTOPUS P. 16 introduction by alex ross perry THE DEVIL BAT P. 17

03 04 05 06 07 08 09 5PM 7PM 7PM 7PM OUTRAGE P. 17 P. 34 THE FACE BEHIND DR. BROADWAY P. 18 alex ross perry in person THE MASK P. 17 7PM 8:30PM P. 34 9PM THE KING OF COMEDY alex ross perry in person ARMORED CAR ROBBERY P. 38 NARROW MARGIN P. 17

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 4PM 7PM 7PM 3PM THUNDERHOOF BEING THERE P. 38 P. 36 BOY AND THE WORLD P. 5 RIDE LONESOME P. 15 introduction by j. hoberman $5 matinee admission 9PM 7PM FRANTZ P. 36 7PM JOHNNY DOESN’T LIVE P. 34 HERE ANYMORE P. 18 8:30PM THE FAMILY JEWELS P. 35 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 5PM 7PM 7PM 7PM THE HOUSE OF FEAR P. 18 ATLANTIQUE P. 40 STRANGE ILLUSION P. 19 THE FALCON AND mati diop in person THE CO-EDS 7PM 9PM NINE GIRLS P. 19 DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI PHANTOM OF PHANTOM OF 9PM CHINATOWN P. 18 CHINATOWN P. 18 KID GLOVE KILLER P. 19

24 25 26 27 28 29 30 4PM 7PM 7PM WHEN STRANGERS MARRY RAW DEAL BACK TO THE FUTURE P. 39 P. 19 WOMAN ON THE RUN THE MARK OF THE P. 20 9:15PM WHISTLER P. 20 BLUE VELVET P. 39 7PM PHAROS OF CHAOS P. 31

Harvard Film Archive The Harvard Film Archive is just east of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts Harvard Square Red Line T stop and next to 24 Quincy Street the . The HFA is one block Cambridge MA 02138 north of Massachusetts Avenue between Broad- 617.495.4700 way and Harvard Streets on the Harvard Uni- harvardfilmarchive.org versity campus.

$9 General Public $7 Students, Seniors, Harvard Faculty and Staff There is limited metered parking in Harvard Special Events priced as indicated Square, which is free after 8pm and all day o Harvard students free except for Special Events Sundays. Parking is also available at several CASH OR CHECK ONLY public lots in Harvard Square.

Tickets are available 45 minutes before showtime. All programs are subject to change. No late seating. Margaret Honda COLOR CORRECTION P. 28 HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 23 THE TOUCH OF MEMORY. THE FILMS OF SOFIA BOHDANOWICZ SEPTEMBER 15 – SEPTEMBER 16

Sofia Bohdanowicz MS SLAVIC 7

Canadian independent filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz (b. 1985) has made a series of subtly intertwined films that each find different ways to explore family history, the archive and intimate memory. Bohdanowicz’ celebrated feature, Maison du Bonheur, reveals her personal yet self-effacing approach to filmmaking as a means to creatively reanimate the past. A disarmingly affectionate portrait of a Parisian widow focused on her everyday rituals and living memories, Maison du Bonheur also offers a refracted self-portrait of Bohdanowicz as director and as a young woman in need of “new memories” to exorcise a sad chapter of her life hinted at but never explained. In a restrained voiceover, Bohdanowicz quietly asserts and questions her presence and motives as an artist, giving the film the gentle uncertainty and searching quality shared by her other works. Bohdanowicz’ debut feature also centers on a spirited elderly woman, the filmmaker’s grandmother, starring in an imagined version of her own life invented in collaboration with Bohdanowicz and Canadian actress Deragh Campbell, who plays an alter-ego granddaughter determined to rekindle an old romance that almost was. With Never Eat Alone, Bohdanowicz embraces a rich but carefully understated intermingling of documentary and that continues, differently, in two very recent films, Veslemøy’s Song and MS Slavic 7, each featuring Deragh Campbell as an intrepid researcher searching for traces of Bohdanowicz’ family members in prominent US libraries. Tinged with self-depreciatory humor, often delivered in sharp but minimalist dialogue, both films discover a deeply personal rela- tionship between the distant past and uncertain present. Set in a fictional version of Harvard’s —where, in fact, papers of Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, the filmmaker’s great-grandmother, are housed—MS Slavic 7 offers a playful and profound reflection on archival research, especially by lingering insightfully upon the tactile and emotional registers of meaning most often dismissed as ancillary. Made in collaboration with Campbell, Veslemøy’s Song and MS Slavic 7 mark a philosophical turn in Bohdanowicz’ filmmaking: both are animated by open questions about the limits of language and interpretation and the responsibilities of the archive. Despite the weight of their inquiries, Bohdanowicz and Campbell (who is credited as co-director of MS Slavic 7) impart a subtle levity to their projects, refin- ing a deadpan comic timing that opens the awkward but pregnant space between words and encounters to give these compact and streamlined films a rare depth and intimacy. – HG The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to partner with Houghton Library to welcome Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell for a screening and discussion of esV - lemøy’s Song and MS Slavic 7. Joining the conversation will be Houghton’s Leslie Morris, Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts. On Tuesday, September 17 at 7pm both Bohdanowicz and Campbell will present and discuss their first collaboration,Never Eat Alone, in the Design and Media Center's Lecture Hall at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Special thanks: Thomas Hyry, Florence Fearrington Librarian of Houghton Library and Director of Arts and Special Collections of Library. sunday september 15 at 5pm Sellam’s ebullience with a wistful melancholia and MAISON DU BONHEUR a touching humility about her filmmaking vocation. A delightful and life affirming portrait-of-sorts, Bo- Directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz hdanowicz’ film is set largely within the flower and Canada 2017, DCP, color, 62 min. French with English subtitles memory filled Montmartre apartment of a Parisian widow and astrologer. Subtly anticipating the fasci- $12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS nation with archival research that inspires Bohdano- SOFIA BOHDANOWICZ AND wicz’ most recent work, Maison du Bonheur gathers DERAGH CAMPBELL IN PERSON a poetic catalogue of Juliane Sellam’s cherished monday september 16 at 7pm daily rituals, possessions and memories: watering With her poignant Veslemøy’s Song, Bo- her bountiful geraniums, displaying still-resplendent hdanowicz collaborated with Deragh Campbell to evening gowns recalling her beloved departed hus- revive the autobiographically inspired character of band. The grandmother of a friend of Bohdanowicz, Audrey Benac, introduced in Never Eat Alone and Sellam is offered as an emblem of joie de vivre and now bound for New York City to listen to a rare a charmingly old-fashioned ideal of feminine beau- recording of the titular piece performed by a little- ty that the film holds up as a kind of liberating self- known female violinist who taught and mentored certainty. The director remains only a partial pres- Bohdanowicz’ own grandfather. for in- ence, heard in brief monologues that counterpoint spiring women from the family past continues, ex- Sofia Bohdanowicz MAISON DU BONHEUR 24 panded, in the remarkable MS Slavic 7, whose title confrontation with an embittered aunt who reveals derives from a collection in Houghton Library—the another thorny branch of the same family tree ex- crown jewel of Harvard’s vast library system—that plored by Bohdanowicz. includes correspondences between Bohdanowicz’ great-grandmother Zofia Bohdanowiczowa and MS SLAVIC 7 poet Józef Wittlin. Resourcefully using the Film Ref- Directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz and Deragh Campbell. With Deragh erence Library of the International Film Fes- Campbell, Aaron Danby, Elizabeth Rucker Canada 2019, DCP, color, 64 min tival as a stand-in for Houghton, MS Slavic 7 follows Audrey’s efforts to read closely between the lines Preceded by of the letters and to understand her responsibili- VESLEMØY’S SONG ties as literary executor of her great-grandmother’s Directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz. With Deragh Campbell, Joan Benac, estate. Structuring the film are scenes with Audrey Steve Benac discussing the meaning of the letters and reflecting Canada 2018, 16mm, b/w, 9 min on interpretation with an interlocutor only disclosed at the end, a device that places awkward and re- vealing pressures on the young woman’s words. A Sofia BohdanowiczVESLEMØY'S SONG fractured flashback, meanwhile, recalls Audrey’s

GODFREY REGGIO, CINEMATIC SEER SEPTEMBER 21 – OCTOBER 14

Godfrey Reggio NAQOYQATSI

Released in 1983, Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi numbers among the more remarkable debut films in American cinema history. The nonnarrative feature with a mysterious title provided an intervention into normal moviegoing, but despite its refusal of character and plot, it was and is engaging and often awe-inspiring in its depiction of American landscape and cityscape. Indeed, Reggio’s commitment to transforming the familiar into the visually fascinating recalls the Lumière brothers’ first films.Koyaanisqatsi quickly became an art-house hit as well as a popular presentation at colleges and universities, and it remains well known among a cine-wise, environmentally concerned younger generation. Beautifully photographed by Ron Fricke, Koyaanisqatsi is accompanied by a Philip Glass soundtrack that has had its own considerable life. The success of the film opened the way for two more: Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002). Each of the Qatsi films is a meditation on a different dimension of modern life, and together they offer a celebration of the magnificence of both natural and human creation, as well as a warning about how much is endangered if we fail to find a more effective balance between nature and technology. In the trilogy, Reggio’s reliance on such unusual techniques as slow-motion aerial photography and stop-motion shooting creates a contemplative experience that is quite distinct from conventional cinema. In some considerable measure, this approach seems a result of the unusual road that led to Reggio’s career as a filmmaker. From the time he was fourteen until he was twenty-eight, Reggio (b. 1940) lived an ascetic life as part of the Christian Brothers, a strict Roman Catholic community. His adolescence and early adulthood were spent in silence, fasting and prayer—though over the years, Reggio gradually became disaffected, as he told me in an interview: One of the vows you take as a Christian Brother is to teach the poor gratuitously. That was the original spirit of the brotherhood, though that spirit is long since gone. There were all sorts of rational and 'correct' reasons why the brothers were not able to teach the poor: it wasn’t practical; if they did teach the poor, they couldn’t sustain their lifestyles. In fact, almost all the children in the schools where I taught were middle-class kids, and yet I lived in this community [Santa Fe], where about forty percent of the people had no access to primary medical care and where the barrio was being eroded out from under the poor. There was great social disintegration . . . So there was a huge community of poverty, and I felt drawn to give some kind of assistance if I could. Reggio’s concern led him to cofound a facility that provided medical care to disenfranchised communities in Santa Fe; an organization to aid juveniles in Santa Fe street gangs; and the Institute for Regional Education, a media collective that produced a series of nonverbal public-interest television spots. He worked with the American Civil Liberties Union to combat governmental invasions of privacy and the use of technology to control behavior. And in time, he came to see filmmaking as a potential means for transforming consciousness about the inequities in his community and around the world. From the opening moments of Koyaanisqatsi, it is clear that Reggio’s focus is something other than romance or adventure; near the beginning, we see what appears to be a rocket liftoff, followed by serene aerial shots of remarkable western sites and stop-motion imagery of cloudscapes. Having created a sense of the grandeur and dignity of the Southwest, Koyaanisqatsi then reveals industrial exploitation of the environment, shifting into highly kinetic time-lapse photography of urban scenes. These sequences demonstrate the remarkable degree to which the modern city-machine functions effectively—traffic zooms along New York City streets and Los Angeles highways; products get made and the day’s work gets accomplished—but ultimately, Reggio’s visual phantasmagoria suggests that the primary product of modern industrialized life is the destruction of individuality and serenity. HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 25 As he worked his way from a 16mm short to the eventual 35mm feature (which angel financing made possible), Reggio was seeing more films and recognizing distinc- tions between commercial cinema and what he was attempting to do:

In my films, I try to eradicate all the foreground of traditional film and give the background the principal focus. I was trying to look at buildings, masses of people, transportation, industrialization as entities in and of themselves . . . Same thing with nature: rather than seeing nature as something dead, something inorganic, like a stone, I wanted to see it as having its own life-form, unanthropomorphized, unrelated to human beings, here for billions of years before human beings arrived on the planet . . . I was trying to show in nature the presence of a life-form, an entity, a Beingness; and in the synthetic world, the presence of a different entity, a consuming and inhuman entity.

At the conclusion of Koyaanisqatsi, on-screen text explains Reggio’s title (formed from elements in the Hopi language, koyaanisqatsi means, “1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living”), and he returns to that early shot in the film: the rocket lifts off, lofting into the sky—where it explodes, its fragments tumbling slowly to earth. Each Qatsi film is introduced by a particular . The subject of Koyaanisqatsi is the ever-more-frenzied way of life that threatens to rocket us into oblivion; the subject of Powaqqatsi is the third-world labor that makes modern society possible. That film’s spectacular opening shots focus on hundreds of men working up and down the steep walls of the Serra Pelada gold mine in Brazil. While viewers will be appalled at this exhausting labor, the strength and stamina of the men are im- pressive, even exhilarating; they are beautiful to watch, often reminiscent of classic statuary. The sequence suggests that the men and women in the Southern Hemisphere who do so much of the world’s dirty work are like Sisyphus in their unrelenting toil and like Christ in the sacrifice of their lives for others (at its end, several workers carry an injured or exhausted man up the mine wall in a manner that evokes the Crucifixion and the Pietà). Of course, the kind of labor we are watching has been part of human societies for millennia—it is what raised the pyramids and the Great Wall of China. Godfrey Reggio PRIVACY CAMPAIGN Powaqqatsi’s kinetic opening sequence and title card are soon followed by a fifty-two-second shot of two women carrying huge bundles on their heads in the early- morning mist. The Glass accompaniment emphasizes the quiet grace of their movements, which have the impact of a miraculous dance. Powaqqatsi goes on to take us from one location to another, presenting consistently remarkable slow-motion imagery in extended shots that allow for contemplation of the variety and beauty of individual laboring human beings. Leonidas Zourdoumis and Graham Berry were the cinematographers, and Philip Glass’s score provides a somber, respectful lyricism. Many of Powaqqatsi’s most memorable shots involve children. Early on, an eighty-seven-second tracking shot pans across the faces of dozens of African boys and girls: their varied reactions to the camera are lovely and compelling, and the myriad physical and psychological differences among them offer a critique of conventional cinema’s frequent use of third-world characters as types. One of the most electrifying shots in the film—really a single extended shot divided in two—is of a small child walking along a highway toward the camera, a huge truck approaching him from behind. At first it appears as if the truck might hit the boy; when it does finally pass him, he disappears in a cloud of dust. The shot seems to end. Then, after much other imagery has intervened and most viewers have probably understood the child’s disappearance as a metaphor for the destruction of childhood by the circumstances of industrialization, Reggio returns to the shot: the thick dust is dispersing and the boy is still walking, unscathed and seemingly unaware that anything unusual has occurred. The moment is transformed into a metaphor for the strength and resilience of third-world children and for their ability to confound our assumptions. The forms of labor Reggio depicts in Powaqqatsi may be ancient, but the laboring world is also full of youthful energy. The imagery in Powaqqatsi is arranged into an overall montage punctuated by sequences that explore particular themes, within a trajectory that moves generally from rural to urban scenes. While the pervasive use of montage in American television advertising functions as a polemic for ever-greater levels of consumption (of products, of film images per minute), Reggio’s montage is as serenely paced as his individual images. It demands that we meditate on individual human beings in those sectors of the world where life is governed by the patterns of consumption we and others like us have set in motion—the patterns revealed by the time-lapse imagery in Koyaanisqatsi. One might object that Reggio himself is using a high-tech industrial process to mount his challenge to industrial society, but as he has said, “No Immaculate Conception is taking place . . . I see myself as a cultural kamikaze, as a Trojan horse, using the coinage of the time in order to raise a question about that very coinage.” Powaqqatsi was shot in multiple locations, primarily Brazil, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Kenya, Nepal and Peru. Indeed, along with Peter Watkins’ The Journey (1987) and Ron Fricke’s Baraka (1992), Powaqqatsi was part of a move during the waning days of the cold war to use modern filmmaking techniques to take account of the diversity and interconnection of the world’s peoples. Like Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi is defined only at the conclusion of the film—as “an entity, a way of life, that consumes the life forces of other beings in order to further its own life”—confirming Reggio’s implicit call for a global transformation in the in- terests of humanity and the environment. But Powaqqatsi can also be understood as a comment on the cinematic experience itself—after all, Reggio is a sorcerer: if his interest in exoticizing the familiar and familiarizing the exotic recalls the Lumières, the brilliant use of slow-motion, time-lapse, aerial and telephoto photography in his films ties him just as fully to Georges Méliès and the invention of film magic. While Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi focus on the social, psychological and spiri- tual impacts of the evolution of industrial development over the past two centuries, Naqoyqatsi is a reflection on the immense, ongoing transformation of global experi- ence that has culminated in the arrival of digital technologies. The grimmest of the Qatsi films, it was Reggio’s attempt “to have the courage to be hopeless,” as he says today. Fittingly, the formative metaphor of the film is the Tower of Babel, as depict- Godfrey Reggio POWAQQATSI ed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in one of his 1563 paintings of the biblical story—the 26 opening image of Naqoyqatsi. In the story, God sees humanity’s quest to maintain unity and achieve the divine by building a tower to the heavens as a threat, both to the well-being of the earth’s people and to his own dominance, and he foils their plans, scattering them across the continents and frustrating their ability to communicate by forcing them to speak myriad languages. In the world of Naqoyqatsi, viewers are lost in the maze of visual “languages” that have arrived with the panoply of modern technologies dedicated to investigating people, engaging them in meaningless communication, selling them an endless supply of products, distracting them with spectacles, and facilitating their violence against one another. The title’s translation—again revealed only as a conclusion—confirms this: naqoyqatsi means, “1. a life of killing each other. 2. war as a way of life. 3. (interpretation) civilized violence.” Naqoyqatsi evokes various dimensions of our ever-more-virtual world by recycling and refashioning ma- terials from commercial and technological sources. Within the darkness of this virtual “light,” only Philip Glass’s elegant score provides an echo of hope. Godfrey Reggio POWAQQATSI Over the past thirty years, the Qatsi films have regularly offered audiences cinema experi- ences that are full of visual and auditory pleasure but go well beyond the goals of conventional entertainment. If most movies are fundamentally propaganda for the status quo, reconfirming what we understand about the world and what we believe, Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi offer a sustained plea for a deeper and more active concern about the costs of our reckless exploitation of the natural environment and the labor of people around the world, and a warning about the dangers of the culture of distraction we are surrounding ourselves with. – Scott MacDonald

The Harvard Film Archive is thrilled to welcome Godfrey Reggio for a rare visit and presentation of his legendary , including the live orchestral perfor- mance of Koyaanisqatsi at the Orpheum Theatre. This program marks and celebrates the acquisition of Godfrey Reggio’s papers, together with the papers of the Institute for Regional Education, the visionary Santa Fe base of Reggio’s filmmaking. The HFA gives special thanks to Daniel Noyes whose generous support made possible this important acquisition. As a division of the Harvard College Library, the HFA’s non-film collections are accessible through Houghton Library. Philip Glass & Ensemble will be performing Koyaanisqatsi Live! at the Orpheum Theatre Friday, September 20 at 8pm. Tickets available through the Orpheum or tickets. globalartslive.org. The day before, WBUR hosts A Conversation with Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass moderated by Haden Guest. The event will be held at CitySpace and tickets are available at wbur.org. Special thanks: Ray Hemenez—Institute for Regional Education; Daniel Noyes and Lawrence Taub.

$12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS panoramic imagery filmed in areas of Louisiana that position is akin to the powerful experiences enjoyed GODFREY REGGIO IN PERSON had been, five years earlier, devastated by Katrina. by the original audiences for the Cinématographe, saturday september 21 at 7pm Reggio’s black-and-white close-ups in Visitors evoke for nineteenth century moving and still panoramas, POWAQQATSI Warhol’s Screen Tests of 1964 - 66, in their composi- and for Louis Daguerre’s Diorama shows. – Adapted Directed by Godfrey Reggio from Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and US 1988, 35mm, color, 99 min tion, as well as in their meditative pace—though the kinds of gaze that interest Reggio are quite differ- Avant-Garde Cinema (2014) by Scott MacDonald Preceded by ent from the gazes of the Factory visitors. Visitors Directed by Godfrey Reggio US 2013, DCP, b/w, 87 min ANIMA MUNDI seems part of a contemporary revival of interest in Directed by Godfrey Reggio the cinematic portrait, shared by filmmakers such as Preceded by 1991, 35mm, color, 28 min Susana de Sousa Dias (48 [2009]) and by Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez (Manakamana [2013]). The EVIDENCE Directed by Godfrey Reggio $12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS experience of looking at Reggio’s stunning imagery US 1995, 35mm, color, 8 min GODFREY REGGIO IN PERSON within the context created by Glass’s elegant com- sunday september 22 at 7pm NAQOYQATSI Directed by Godfrey Reggio US 2002, 35mm, color, 89 min

Preceded by PRIVACY CAMPAIGN—AN IRE MEDIA PROJECT Directed by Godfrey Reggio US 1974, digital video, color, 6 min monday october 14 at 7pm VISITORS After Naqoyqatsi, Reggio didn’t finish a new feature until Visitors. These substantial gaps in time are ne- cessitated in part by the filmmaker’s commitment to making technically advanced films for large-scale theatrical exhibition—money for these sorts of proj- ects is not easy to come by—and presumably by the meditative sensibility that seems to infuse their films. Visitors, like Reggio’s earlier features, was devel- oped in collaboration with composer Philip Glass, but while it sometimes evokes the Qatsi Trilogy, it is distinct both formally (Visitors was shot in elegant black-and-white on 3K and 5K high-definition vid- eo and released in 4K) and in terms of its subject matter: Reggio’s focus is on portraits of individu- als, nearly all of them in close-up, interspersed with Godfrey Reggio VISITORS

HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 27 AN EVENING WITH MARGARET HONDA SEPTEMBER 27

It was only after distinguishing herself as a renowned sculptor and artist that Margaret Honda (b. 1961) began to work in cinema. Her films to date—the 70mm Spectrum Reverse Spectrum (2014), the 35mm Color Correction (2015) and the 16mm Wildflow- ers—each bring to bear the same exactitude of ma- terial and method as her art practice by harnessing the photochemical processes refined over a century by the to produce commercial exhibition prints. For the three films Honda closely collaborated with Hollywood professionals, lab technicians whose unique contributions to cinema are all too rarely ac- knowledged or engaged and who have been facing an until now delayed as the studios and commercial interests conspire to make film an obso- lete luxury afforded only to elite . The result of Honda’s patient collaborations are films in the purest sense, unique photochemical objects, shaped and stamped by the precisely controlled variables of Margaret Honda COLOR CORRECTION chemical, temperature and those calibrated yet intui- tive decisions and compensations that the lab techni- cians alone are able to make. As objects that must be projected in a theater to be experienced and understood, Honda’s films are vital interventions that demand a committed spectator and institution able to appreciate cinema refined to its purest quintessence, as the controlled projection of light through a plastic and photochemi- cal substrate. Honda’s films—often both camera-less and imageless—give vital life to the texture and grain and palpable experience of film as film, freed from the burden of representing and meaning more than the already profound surface. Honda’s imageless films also embrace cinema as a pure mode of conceptual and, in a sense, performance art, as objects that give renewed meaning to the post-Duchampian object and find meaning and resonance in the emotive traces and resonances of industrial production. For her first HFA program, Honda will present three films: two versions of her short 16mm workWildflowers , first in French and then in English—both spoken by fellow filmmaker-artist Morgan Fisher—followed by her celebrated work on 35mm, Color Correction. The HFA is pleased to welcome MIT List Visual Art Center Director of Exhibitions and Curator Henriette Huldisch to join the post-screening conversation. The Harvard Film Archive gratefully acknowledges its partnership with the Radcliffe Institute seminar organized by artists Matt Saunders and Jennifer Bornstein. – HG Special thanks: Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard; Matt Saunders and Jennifer Bornstein.

$12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS rules for finding and printing them are the basis for have tried to make the film you’re seeing. It made MARGARET HONDA IN CONVERSATION WITH HENRIETTE HULDISCH making Color Correction as a multiple, using a dif- itself. – Margaret Honda friday september 27 at 7pm ferent set of tapes for each print. For my first film I used only 70mm print stock, a print- While working on Color Correction, I was given two COLOR CORRECTION Directed by Margaret Honda er and a timing tape specifically made to control the 16mm Kodachrome magazines and I used these US 2015, 35mm, color, silent, 101 min printer’s light valves in order to produce the color to make Wildflowers. Kodachrome processing had spectrum. When I saw that the tape alone served stopped a couple of years before, so I knew I was Preceded by basically working with black-and-white negative. I as the printing element, I understood I could make a WILDFLOWERS (FLEURS SAUVAGES) film using existing timing tapes from any movie. That decided to shoot wildflowers. In the midst Directed by Margaret Honda was the idea for Color Correction. I was able to get of a , they made me think of the material I US 2015, 16mm, b/w printed on color stock, 3 min. In French timing tapes from an unknown recent narrative fea- was about to use—something known for its color but ture. For my purposes, the tapes could have come facing a limited future. The magazines had expired WILDFLOWERS Directed by Margaret Honda from any other film of the same type and era. This in the early 1960s, and as I was shooting I could US 2015, 16mm, b/w printed on color stock, 3 min interchangeability of printing elements and the strict hear the emulsion crumbling off the base. I couldn’t

THE MCMILLAN-STEWART FELLOWSHIP: DIEUDO HAMADI SEPTEMBER 28 – OCTOBER 5

Over the past ten years, Dieudo Hamadi has emerged as one of the most prominent figures in contemporary documentary cinema. His work bears witness to living conditions in the large African country where he was born, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and, to a certain extent, to situations that occur in many other forms throughout much of Sub-Saharan Africa. Born in Kisangani (DRC) on February 22, 1984, Dieudonné Hamadi studied multiple audiovisual disciplines and began his career as a director for music videos and commercials. He has worked for Suka! Production, the production company of director Djo Munga, whom he assisted on the Viva Riva! (2010). He has also pursued training in , in particular under a structure established by INSAS (the prestigious national film school of Brussels) and at La Fémis (its Parisian equivalent). Dieudo Hamadi made his debut as a documentary director in 2009 with contributions to a collective project initiated by a South African company but devoted to representing different aspects of Congolese society, Congo en 4 actes. Hamadi directed two of the four parts, Dames en attente (see below) and Tolérance zéro, on the widespread practice of rape, both as a weapon of conflict and within everyday relationships marked by sexist violence. He thus began a at the 28 most intimate level of human relation, including its darkest facets, often choosing one or two individuals as reference points for his subject matter. A skilled cameraman and editor, he often works alone, which allows him an unusual proximity with the people that he films. He has taken an interest in various social subjects: the healthcare system (Dames en attente), the electoral process (Atalaku), the educational system (Examen d’Etat), sexual violence and child abuse (Maman Colonel), civil society’s attempts to make itself heard within an ultra-repressive context (Kinshasa Makambo) or, in his new film, En route pour le milliard, the aftermath of the multiple armed conflicts that have ravaged his country. In each case, his approach—attention to everyday details and bodies, close observation that remains free of any domineering or a priori view—provides access to the complexity of situations that are at once specific and indicative of a much broader whole. Above all, Hamadi’s films stand out among other documentaries on the functioning of institutions for their singular filming style; he taps into the energy of his protagonists, and the intensity—positive or negative—of their relationships electrifies the shoot, thereby opening up another level beyond that of factual description. In successive flashes of insight, the films of Dieudo Hamadi thus elaborate the impressive, at times disturbing portrait of a society where violence, extreme poverty and corruption reign, where recourse to the supernatural—whether in the innumerable Christian churches with their highly creative mysticism, in consultations with shamans and healers, or through omnipresent reference to sorcery—serves to distract from the countless difficulties of existence. An unflinching look at the multiple negative aspects of Congolese society, Hamadi’s films also attest to the engagement and courage of many people within that society, especially among women and younger populations. – Jean-Michel Frodon The Film Study Center, the McMillan-Stewart Foundation and the Harvard Film Archive are thrilled to welcome Dieudo Hamadi, this year’s winner of the Film Study Center's Geneviéve McMillan – Reba Stewart Fellowship in Distinguished Filmmaking. All text by Jean-Michel Frodon, translated by Amanda Gann. Presented in partnership with the Film Study Center, Harvard. Special thanks: Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Julie Mallozzi, Cozette Russell—Film Study Center; and the McMillan-Stewart Advisory Committee: Mati Diop, Jean-Michel Frodon, Alain Gomis, Véréna Paravel and Rasha Salti saturday september 28 at 7pm during the exam in order to obtain their diplomas. rishioners, endlessly invoking the name of the Lord EXAMEN D'ÉTAT (NATIONAL DIPLOMA) This organized cheating on a national scale reflects to convince women in the audience to donate money. The high school exit examination, which grants di- an environment where corruption is the rule, a rule He becomes a tout for candidates in the elections, plomas and allows entrance to university, is per- known and accepted by all even if officials make a a “crier” who incites local residents to attend meet- ceived as a passport to a better life. A poor teen- big show of their respect for procedure. As it brings ings for the political hopefuls who employ him; as age orphan who works in the markets before and these processes to light, Examen d'état also offers, he goes through the markets distributing small sums after school to survive, Joël serves as a guide and through Joël and his classmates, a series of portraits of money, little electoral arguments entrusted to him conduit into the violent, cynical and unjust world that of some extraordinarily keen young people, who by incumbents to the national assembly, he keeps is the final year of high school. Although they ab- are capable of mobilizing a wide range of strategic as much as he can for himself. The second protago- solutely need, or think they need, to attend the last skills in the attempt to reach their goal. nist is an orchestra of some twenty members, young year of high school in order to have a chance on Directed by Dieudo Hamadi musicians who rehearse, argue and get drunk in a the exam, the students who cannot afford to pay for DRC/France 2014, DCP, color, 92 min. Lingala and French with English vast cemetery. The third is a group of young women subtitles the third trimester are ruthlessly excluded. The feel- who belong to a citizens’ association; they canvas ing of injustice is even more acute as many classes the streets explaining to people why and how to from the preceding terms, for which the students did sunday september 29 at 7pm vote and supervise ballot procedure in polling sta- pay, never took place: often working without pay, ATALAKU tions. Through these encounters, Atalaku captures teachers frequently go on strike. Alongside this ad- Filmed during the 2012 elections, supposedly the the shameless use of bribes, as well as the political ministrative confrontation, multiple magic practices first democratic elections since the nation’s indepen- passion of many citizens, the misogyny still in force participate in the effort to ensure good results on dence in 1960, Atalaku (“Town Criers”) describes including among “democrats,” and the force of a the exam: Christian priests hawk supposedly sal- with equal vigor the poor functioning of democracy clergy imbued with mysticism. The film ends with the vific benedictions while shamans offer various within the country as well as a multiplicity of facets riots that stem from an electoral process so clearly magic recipes. Students excluded from the school of daily life and human relationships that this cir- marred by numerous irregularities, and the repres- for financial reasons band together to study in an cumstance helps reveal. The film follows three cen- sion that ensues. But it is the whole of relations to the atmosphere also marked by corruption and power tral protagonists. The first, Gaylor, is an ordinary electoral process that appears as biased, ineffec- struggles. Ultimately, all are counting on cheating pastor, affiliate of a church where he exhorts his pa- tive and immoral, even before the fraud that would bring dictator Joseph Kabila back to power. Directed by Dieudo Hamadi DRC/France 2013, 35mm, color, 60 min. Lingala and French with English subtitles

Preceded by LADIES IN WAITING (DAMES EN ATTENTE) The first short in the omnibus Congo en 4 actes, this film takes place in a maternity ward in Kinshasa—an environment familiar to Hamadi, who studied medi- cine before turning his hand to filmmaking. Through the exemplary situation of women who have just given birth, the film presents in detail the unbear- able tension within a dysfunctional society, marked at once by tremendous poverty and violence (which translates in particular to numerous rapes and chil- dren born of these rapes); the unrestrained com- moditization of relationships; widespread corrup- tion; and a litigious bureaucracy. Dames en attente focuses on the hospital accountant—whose job it is to collect birthing fees from women who cannot af- ford to pay—as she pleads a particularly dire case to the administration, or even attempts to convince the children’s fathers (if they have not disappeared) Dieudo Hamadi EXAMEN D'ETAT to foot the bill. As witness to situations—occasionally HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 29 transferred to a larger city, Kisangani, also Hama- di’s birthplace. Supported by a small group of po- lice officers, she has to convince residents to report the numerous crimes that take place in the city’s dis- advantaged neighborhoods and find safe havens for those who need them. Two wounds are particu- larly active. One is the “six-day war” that ravaged the city in 2000, during which many women were raped, their husbands and sons killed, and all their possessions destroyed or stolen. Some of them now find themselves with children born out of that atroc- ity. Another is that of a family structure in which men frequently disappear for multiple reasons, which correlates with innumerable abuses inflicted on chil- dren who are then accused of sorcery to legitimate the mistreatment. With an impressive level of deter- mination and skill, and well aware of the limitations of her efforts, Maman Colonelle tirelessly struggles Dieudo Hamadi KINSHASA MAKAMBO against this tight web of poverty, violence, obscuran- tism and egotism. From the precinct to the slums, from extreme—that ordinarily remain hidden, the film de- ercion. Closely inscribed within a particular historical the markets where Colonel Honorine berates shop- velops a rich portrait that refuses to pass judgment; and geographical reality, this film—whose director keepers to negotiations with public figures looking instead, it makes manifest the endless obstacles and makes the unconditional choice throughout to remain to appropriate the benefits of her work, and even dead-ends within a collective mechanism, one not next to his protagonists—also reflects more broadly into the privacy of her home, Hamadi stays close by limited, of course, to maternity wards. on the forms of political engagement. Although they his heroine. She becomes a mirror for a diseased Directed by Dieudo Hamadi and Divita Wa Lusala share in the same struggle, the three protagonists society, but one that nonetheless pulsates with admi- DRC/South Africa 2009, 35mm, color, 24 min. French with English subtitles do not have the same analysis on how to continue to rable forces of life. their fight: one chooses to join an opposition political Directed by Dieudo Hamadi $12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS party, which, in spite of its limitations, represents a DRC/France 2017, DCP, color, 72 min. Lingala, Swahili and French with DIEUDO HAMADI IN PERSON possibility of acceding to power; another sticks to English subtitles friday october 4 at 7pm his uncompromising opposition to a corrupt system; KINSHASA MAKAMBO the third looks to alternative forms of organization “My country is an open-air prison,” says Dieudo for possible answers. Through Hamadi’s lens, these Hamadi. In 2015, the constitution had provided for ideas take shape through words, looks and gestures a least a change of prison warden, but Joseph Kabi- in an intensely vital and moving way. la, president dictator of the Democratic Republic of Directed by Dieudo Hamadi Congo, decided to change the constitution. Young DRC/France/Switzerland/Germany/Qatar/Norway 2018, DCP, color, 75 people from major cities the streets in a protest min. Lingala and French with English subtitles of unprecedented scale. The film follows three activ- ists in particular: Christian, Ben and Jean-Marie. In $12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS an impressive demonstration of physical courage, on DIEUDO HAMADI IN PERSON par with that of his subjects, Dieudo Hamadi experi- saturday october 5 at 7pm ences at close range the deadly clashes with police MAMA COLONEL and army, who shoot with real bullets. But he is also First seen in Tolérance zero, where she combatted embedded in the daily lives of these young people in the context of a special who receive regular threats and criticism from their police brigade, Honorine Munyole, now a colonel, families and must face the doubts and fears of a selflessly leads a vigorous campaign against rape situation of extreme violence that seems unlikely to and the mistreatment of children in the provincial end. Kinshasa Makambo also reveals the internal de- capital of Bukavu. She has instated a number of bates of these protestors as they seek to extend their mechanisms for their protection and solidarity, in- movement without succumbing to repression and co- cluding refuges for the most vulnerable. But she is Dieudo Hamadi MAMA COLONEL

VITALINA VARELA SEPTEMBER 30 – OCTOBER 7 A moving study of mourning and memory, Pedro Costa’s revelatory new film offers an indelible portrait of Vitalina Tavares Varela, a fragile yet indomitable woman who makes the long voyage from Cape Verde to Lisbon to attend her estranged husband’s funeral but misses the event itself because of cruel bureaucratic delays. The name and tragic story will be familiar to those who know Costa’s last work, Horse Money, in which Vitalina appears as one of the ghostly figures alternately con- fronting and comforting Costa-regular Ventura during his soul-searching stay in a haunted sanitorium. Vitalina Varela forms a diptych with that earlier film, extending its intermingling of personal and national trauma while refining Costa’s unique mode of oneiric first-person cinema in which inner voices are theatrically recited aloud like prayers. Ventura returns here as a priest gripped by a crisis of faith that recalls the fear, trembling and self-doubt animating his somnambulant patient in Horse Money. Vitalina’s singular presence, meanwhile, is dramatically expanded into a mesmerizing titular role that lends simmering power to the larger project shaped across Costa’s post-Vanda films to give epic but still intimate cinematic dimensions to the urgent struggles of the dispossessed. Equally a work of sculpture as of cinema, Vitalina Varela embraces a radical cinematography that transforms bodies and buildings into haunting presences floating in a netherworld between day and night, between color and black-and-white. While Vitalina Varela makes vivid the painful weight of difficult love and poverty, the film also gradually reveals a tender, almost optimistic, side in its vision of a community that murmurs solace through its interconnected walls and offers sustenance to those most in need. – HG The Harvard Film Archive is honored to welcome back legendary filmmaker Pedro Costa to present and discuss his latest film. Special thanks: Dennis Lim, Sophia Tate—Film at . 30 monday september 30 at 7pm HORSE MONEY (CAVALO DINHEIRO) Horse Money is a mesmerizing and radical expansion of the milestone chronicle of dis- placed peoples and dreams that stretches across Pedro Costa’s so-called Fontainhas trilogy, named for the endangered and ultimately destroyed neighborhood where Os- sos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006) all take place. While the earlier films are largely choral, interweaving multiple characters and stories, Horse Money focuses resolutely upon the figure of Ventura, the aging Cape Verdean immigrant and construction worker first seen inColossal Youth, and now convalescing in a sanatorium transformed by Costa—and DP Leonardo Simões—into a shadowy, oneiric and almost Caligarian space. The ethereally beautiful and frightening sculptural figures hewn by Costa and Simões make indistinguishable the friends and ghosts who visit Ventura and set Horse Money adrift between haunting stories of Portugal’s vanished past and troubled present. Directed by Pedro Costa. With Ventura, Vitalina Varela, Tito Furtado Portugal 2014, DCP, color, 103 min. Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese with English subtitles

Also screening as part of the Cinema of Resistance program, this page.

$12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS PEDRO COSTA IN PERSON monday october 7 at 7pm VITALINA VARELA Pedro Costa VITALINA VARELA Directed by Pedro Costa. With Vitalina Varela, Ventura, Manuel Tavares Almeida Portugal 2019, DCP, color, 124 min. Cape Verdean Creole and Portuguese with English subtitles

CINEMA OF RESISTANCE SEPTEMBER 30 – NOVEMBER 24 At a time when so many are called to resist the White House’s attacks on numerous fronts, we at the HFA feel compelled to do our part. Cinema has always been a method of examining the world as it is, with the possibility of raising understanding, inspiring change, and imagining other possibilities. Cinema of Resistance is a monthly series of films that embraces these alternate possibilities, animated by the spirit of protest and designed to call out oppression and demand justice. These screenings will be designed to spark discussion, beginning in our theater directly after the screening. Film descriptions by Haden Guest and Brittany Gravely. Special thanks: Stefan Droessler—Filmmuseum . monday september 30 at 7pm HORSE MONEY (CAVALO DINHEIRO) Directed by Pedro Costa. With Ventura, Vitalina Varela, Tito Furtado Portugal 2014, DCP, color, 103 min. Portuguese with English subtitles

See description in Pedro Costa program, this page.

$12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS FRANÇOIS OZON IN PERSON monday october 21 at 7pm BY THE GRACE OF GOD (GRÂCE À DIEU) Directed by François Ozon. With Melvil Poupaud, Denis Ménochet, Swann Arlaud France/Belgium 2019, DCP, color, 137 min. French with English subtitles

See description in François Ozon program, p. 36. Pedro Costa HORSE MONEY

sunday november 24 at 7pm PHAROS OF CHAOS (LEUCHTTURM DES CHAOS) Wolf-Eckart Bühler had already made one film about the adventurous, seafaring Ster- ling Hayden (Der Havarist/The Shipwrecker) and finally tracked down the man in per- son to make this frank, fascinating document. Bühler finds the semi-retired actor, war hero, occasional writer and itinerant sailor whiling away his days—frequently drunk or stoned—living on a barge in France. Bearing more than a passing resemblance to his character in Altman’s The Long Goodbye, the wild and weathered old man of the sea and out of time enjoys quoting his favorite literature and telling anecdotes until finally opening up about his alcoholism, his loneliness, his “creative impotency,” and his deepest shame: publicly naming names in Hollywood during the Red Scare. Dismissing most of his acting career as meaningless roles offered as a reward for his betrayal, he is proud of only of a handful of films—The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Dr. Strangelove (1964) among them. By the time Bühler catches up with him, Hayden’s dark and stormy life ex- ists between paradise and the “prison without bars” his tortured soul has become. Directed by Wolf-Eckart Bühler and Manfred Blank 1983, 35mm, color, 119 min. English and German with English subtitles Wolf-Eckart Bühler and Manfred Blank PHAROS OF CHAOS HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 31 UNCOMFORTABLY YOURS. THE FILMS OF ALEX ROSS PERRY OCTOBER 18 – NOVEMBER 16

Among the few wholly uncompromised artists working in American in- dependent cinema today, Alex Ross Perry (b. 1984) has written and di- rected a series of compelling, sharp-edged films focused on unconventional characters whose dark intelligence and vulnerabilities only reveal them- selves gradually. The struggling artists deromanticized in two key films best embody the complexly multilayered portraiture central to Perry’s cinema. If the arrogant, narcissistic young novelist in Listen Up Philip and the self- destructive grunge star in Her Smell are unabashedly “difficult” characters of a kind only rarely seen in contemporary American cinema, they are also difficult in unexpected ways that enrich and challenge the viewer’s under- standing of the subtly shifting desires and relationships that animate the films. Talented yet insecure, their inability to appreciate elusive success and weather inevitable failure renders both writer and musician unexpectedly sympathetic and especially sensitive to the empty accolades and petty rivalries that are the daily bread of the artistic communities observed askance by Perry, who himself has yet to be invited behind the carefully guarded velvet ropes of so-called “indie cinema.” Alex Ross Perry THE COLOR WHEEL As author and songwriter, the chipped antiheroes of both Listen Up Philip and Her Smell make clear the subversive charge given to language and dialogue by Perry’s screenplays, here by using dark humor and aggressive wordplay to detonate expected codes of performance and social rituals, upturning cocktail party banter and intimate conversations alike. The halting rhythm and acerbic under- statement refined by Perry’s dialogue aptly captures the queasy tensions girding the familial or family-like relationships that recur across his films; the brother and sister on the road in The Color Wheel, the inter-nested neighborhood couples in Golden Exits, the frenemies of Queen of Earth, the band members of Her Smell. Perry’s breakthrough filmThe Color Wheel announced his rare ability to carefully simmer inter-relational tensions with a seemingly casual disregard, threading the deadpan waiting time of its road movie story with jittery comedic sparks until its strangely cathartic and uneasy ending. Intimacy cuts deep in Perry’s films, leaving lasting scars and neuroses that metastasize and bloom like hothouse flowers, gifting his characters with dark dimensions only partially revealed. An ardent, indefatigable cinephile who spent formative years working in New York’s legendary Kim’s Video—alongside his longtime cinematographer —Perry channels the edgy, inventive cinema forged by a storied cast of master directors that includes Altman, Bergman, Fassbinder, May, Polanski, Rohmer and . While the sweaty, anxious and performatively liberated films of the Seventies remain an important touchstone for Perry, his influences are equally literary as cinematic, with Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon and, above all, , hovering like stars high above the willfully crooked paths forged by his films to date. An open secret to Perry’s steady productivity and consistency of tone and rhythm is his long-term collaboration with prolific cinematographer Williams and, more recently, editor Robert Greene, himself an accomplished documentarian. Shooting always on film, with a striking lyricism and understanding of natural light, Williams shares Perry’s deep commitment to the rigor and poetry of film as film, and to the subtle magic of the photochemical image. – HG For his first visit to the Harvard Film Archive, Perry has selected four films from the Archive’s vast collection, personal touchstones and objects of strange cinematic desire offered here as portals into the fertile imagination of a singular artist who draws creative sustenance from the deep well of film history. The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to welcome Alex Ross Perry as a 2019-20 Baby Jane Holzer Visiting Fellow in Film in partnership with the Department of Art, Film and Visual Studies and the Theater, Dance, and Media Program. Special thanks: Robin Kelsey, Dean of Arts and Humanities, Harvard; Robb Moss—Film Study Center and the Department of Art, Film, and Visual Studies, Harvard; Sylvaine Guyot—Theater, Dance & Media and Romance Languages & Literatures, Harvard; Jake Perlin—Metrograph Pictures.

friday october 18 at 7pm sunday october 27 at 7pm LISTEN UP PHILIP Openly inspired by the writings of Perry’s long-time idol Philip Roth, and his Zuckerman novels in particular, Listen Up Philip gives Jason Schwartz- man one of his best roles to date as an eccentric and insufferable writer perched at the edge of a successful career he both feels entitled to and secretly fears. A cautionary tale about hubris and artistic ambition, Listen Up Philip is also a cutting satire of the writer’s life that seems to embrace, only to upend, all too well known literary rites of passage: the dissolution of a toxic relationship, acceptance into incestuous salons, mentorship with an older writer that sours into rivalry. Using a ruminative voiceover (spo- ken by Eric Bogosian), Perry tellingly gives his film a novelistic richness of perspective, at one point breaking away from Schwartzman’s Philip to follow his photographer girlfriend, given real depth by a marvelous —in her first collaboration with Perry—while also linger- ing on the figure of the older writer-mentor played with nervous intensity by the great Jonathan Pryce. Directed by Alex Ross Perry. With Jason Schwartzman, Elisabeth Moss, Jonathan Pryce US/Greece 2014, 35mm, color, 108 min

Alex Ross Perry LISTEN UP PHILIP 32 itself in abrupt flashbacks to the previous summer at the same place, allowing for a jarringly slippery perspective on how both women have changed while elucidating Catherine’s tenuous hold on present real- ity, which even the audience begins to question. Ex- acerbated by the unsettling presence of a persistent interlocutor, Catherine’s breakdown and Virginia’s entanglement in it contains nothing solid or comfort- ing for either the characters or the audience, only distorted reflections bouncing between the charac- ters and out into the theater beyond its unearthly, eerie ending. Directed by Alex Ross Perry. With Elisabeth Moss, Katherine Waterston, Patrick Fugit US 2015, 35mm, color, 90 min

friday october 25 at 9pm BODY DOUBLE This film operates as the ur-text of in the cinema, and crucially includes the first instance of a video store appearing in a Hollywood film. The snake eating its own tail. A character going to Tower Video to purchase a videotape of a —newly relegated to the home after a decade Brian De Palma BODY DOUBLE or so of theatrical exhibition—says more about what was happening in the 1980s to American mov- saturday october 19 at 9pm would emerge unchanged for the worse. They are ies and cinematic evolution than anything else. Sim- THE COLOR WHEEL dull, perverse, cheap and their very existence de- ply a perfect film, and like all the others on this list, In his second feature, Perry works only with flat fies all logic of what movies are and why they are one whose impact and importance was not immedi- shades of grey to fill in the infinite spectrum of his made. For some reason, the Harvard Film Archive ately apparent in any academic or historical way. sardonic, deviant strain of . In the has a print of one of these films and to not share it The fact the De Palma made Body Double, which is film that put the young director’s name on every crit- with an unsuspecting audience for the first time since no doubt regarded today as a keystone to under- ic’s watch list, twenty-something JR, an aspiring news I had it in heavy rotation at the video store where I standing him as a filmmaker, in between the iconic reporter, recruits her brother Colin—still living at worked would be a missed opportunity. – ARP but atypical-for-him (at the time) Scarface and the home—to accompany her across the country to re- Directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. With Roy Huston, David Hammond, irrelevant, unknown Wise Guys is as fascinating as trieve belongings from her ex-boyfriend/professor. Judith Snow Lynch going from experimental to US 1967, 35mm, color, 59 min Their respective insecurities provide plenty of ma- sweeping, Oscar-nominated and terial for the siblings’ relentless—and mostly hilari- then to the catastrophe of . Careers are long ous, occasionally —insults and banter; the friday october 25 at 7pm and strange, as I believe all four of my selections for oddly complementary and oppositional bond only QUEEN OF EARTH this program exemplify. – ARP showing signs of tenderness when one is in the cross- Summoning films like Ingmar Directed by Brian De Palma. With Craig Wasson, , hairs of those even more ridiculously cruel than they Bergman’s Persona and ’s Images, Per- Gregg Henry US 1984, 35mm, color, 114 min are. With a style and tone that feels as careless and ry withholds all life-preservers in his acidic portray- awkwardly self-consciousness as its two unsympa- al of a woman coming apart. Elisabeth Moss fear- thetic leads, the film maintains a bizarrely engaging lessly explores the edges of sanity as Catherine who INTRODUCTION BY ALEX ROSS PERRY and unnerving balance of comedy and agitation. has retreated to her friend Virginia’s lakeside cabin saturday november 2 at 7pm When unguarded connection and compassion finally after the death of her famous and beloved father THE ELEPHANT MAN appear, the emotional release is compromised with- followed by a break-up with a longtime lover. The This is one of my top ten favorite films of all time. in a uniquely perverse surprise ending—much of the depth of the friends’ densely knotted—and at times The further away I get from accepting that this film shock stemming from the seemingly motivationless painfully antagonistic—relationship often reveals is part of my DNA and the more times I find my- characters and their director suddenly appearing in a sharper, more complicated and strategic light. Directed by Alex Ross Perry. With Carlen Altman, Alex Ross Perry, Bob Byington US 2012, 35mm, b/w, 83 min

THE MAGIC LAND OF MOTHER GOOSE There was a time where you could walk into a video store and, if you were lucky, that store would be staffed by maniacal weirdos with decades of eso- teric knowledge who would be playing something on the television set so bizarre and so inane that you had to stop and ask “What is this?” Any Her- schell Gordon Lewis film would do the trick, and of course he is mostly known for his splatter-fest hor- ror masterpieces such as Blood Feast, Two Thousand Maniacs! and The Wizard of Gore. But HGL also made several truly deranged “children’s” films that are unsuitable for children of any age at any point in time. These are nightmare fuel, pure and simple. No child who was taken to a matinee of these films Alex Ross Perry HER SMELL HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 33 $12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS ALEX ROSS PERRY IN PERSON monday november 4 at 7pm HER SMELL Perry’s longest and arguably most ambitious film to date takes to another level his long interest in cre- ative angst and the instinctual (mis)communication between old acquaintances, centered now on the raging figure of a grunge star burning all bridges with self-destructive abandon. Elisabeth Moss deliv- ers a raw, unbridled performance as Becky Some- thing, seen first in a post-performance rush turned maelstrom as she tears through backstage dressing rooms, lacerating bandmates, rivals and ex-husband alike while her personal shaman awaits. Four im- mersive, real-time chapters vividly evoke the ex- hilaration and inevitable disappointment of fickle rock stardom, tracking the dangerous admixture of adrenaline, fear and aching loneliness that fuels Becky’s performative on-and-offstage selves while moving the film, in lurching steps, towards apos- Alex Ross Perry GOLDEN EXITS sible redemption. Although Her Smell openly evokes self connecting to various permutations of the “sad ticular female , as opposed to his usual Courtney Love in its title and key details, Perry lonely monster” story (The Phantom of the Opera, lonely, angry man. I think a print of this played once avoids biopic cliché by giving just enough time to The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Beauty and the Beast in New York, though I cannot imagine how or why I supporting characters—bandmates, family and, in [sidenote: why is the source material for all of these missed it. Anyway, I made a short documentary on a resonant performance, Eric Stoltz as Becky’s har- French?]) the more I realize that my innate emo- Paul that should now be available on the Criterion ried manager—to craft a fascinating study of the tional connection to every version of this story can Channel. – ARP unstable relationship between star and all of those dependent on the fame they both relish and resent. be traced back to the heartbreaking tale of John/ Directed by . With Natasha Richardson, William Forsythe, Joseph Merrick and how deeply it spoke to me as Ving Rhames Directed by Alex Ross Perry. With Elisabeth Moss, Angel Christian Roman, US 1988, 35mm, color, 108 min Cara Delevingne a teenager when I first saw this movie. This is, in US/Greece 2019, DCP, color, 134 min my opinion, perhaps the most ostentatiously beauti- ful and emotional film ever made. It conquers every $12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS ALEX ROSS PERRY IN PERSON saturday november 16 at 7pm classical Hollywood melodrama, musical, tragedy IMPOLEX and love story. I always think about what Lynch’s ca- sunday november 3 at 7pm reer would have been like if he’d been able to op- GOLDEN EXITS Despite its postwar backdrop and soundtrack, Alex erate in this mode ever again, but considering that A slow-burning chamber piece tracing the steady Ross Perry’s first feature appears relatively indiffer- this is his second film, after only Eraserhead, the in- drift of two couples, Golden Exits finds Perry work- ent to nostalgia or any conspicuous artistry. Compel- dividual achievement is monumental enough. – ARP ing in a lower key to fathom the disappointments of ling despite—or perhaps because of—its funny, flat friendship and the perils of believing in unspoken delivery, Impolex owes much of its circular inspira- Directed by David Lynch. With , John Hurt, Anne Bancroft US 1980, 35mm, b/w, 123 min promises. Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz is revelatory tion to Thomas Pynchon’s notoriously sprawling novel as Nick, a frustrated archivist channeling his unspo- Gravity’s Rainbow. The film follows World War II sol- INTRODUCTION BY ALEX ROSS PERRY ken angst into his work on his late father-in-law’s dier Tyrone Slothrop through a forested, dreamlike saturday november 2 at 9:30pm papers when interrupted by the arrival of a wide- purgatorial zone—which could be any number of metaphysical spaces or none at all—as he listlessly PATTY HEARST eyed and beautiful Australian intern who comes to searches for two lost V-2 rockets. Tyrone’s ambigu- Full disclosure: I have not seen this movie. But what is work with him for the summer. Chloe Sevigny brings ous mission recalls Beckett as much as Carroll as the point of a carte blanche if I am not able to cross a world-weariness and creeping misanthropy to it is periodically interrupted by cryptic encounters an elusive white whale off of my list? Paul Schrader her role as Nick’s wife—tellingly, a psychologist— with apparitions, old friends, informants, a girlfriend is one of my favorite filmmakers, and his influence cursed with the ability to read the larger patterns on me as a chronicler of the angry, misunderstood of bad habits. Rounding out the cast are Jason and isolated cannot be overstated. American Gig- Schwartzman as a music producer secretly search- olo is another top-10 entry for me, and for years I ing for a new direction, and an electric Mary-Louise have tried to get somebody to screen Patty Hearst Parker as Nick’s overbearing and harshly judgmen- so I could finally see how Schrader handles this par- tal sister-in-law whose pronouncements are as cruel as they are correct. The late summer glow of Wil- liams’ gorgeous close-ups and camerawork gently counterpoint the simmering resentment and miscom- munication that pull these talented but deeply self- absorbed professionals into stylish traps of their own making. Golden Exits may echo the musical sym- metries of Rohmer, but it also injects an assertive dissonance. With its sympathetic but hard question- ing of neo-Yuppiedom defined by the artistic/arti- sanal class, Golden Exits reveals Perry as a wise but bracing antidote to the cloy whimsy and hipsterism that typically imbues contemporary indie films set in Brooklyn. Directed by Alex Ross Perry. With Emily Browning, Adam Horovitz, Mary-Louise Parker US 2018, 35mm, color, 94 min Alex Ross Perry QUEEN OF EARTH Paul Schrader PATTY HEARST 34 and a talking octopus. His bored incoherency and writing, directing and producing the film—felt like sluggish apprehension of events resembles a state the most logical and yet baffling way to grapple drug-induced or sleep-deprived. This amnesiac, dis- with whatever ego, neurosis and identity issues must sociative fugue forces the audience to be just as lost, have been plaguing him at the time. To shove that confused, uncomfortable, amused or philosophical. much of yourself down the audience’s throat felt like With none of the usual physical or cinematic guide- catharsis of the highest order, and this coalesced posts, Perry takes his audience somewhere com- with my intentions of writing, directing, producing, pletely different, and sometimes it feels like going editing and acting in The Color Wheel. Unlike Jerry, nowhere at all. it wasn’t for me, and it was an experiment I never Directed by Alex Ross Perry. With Riley O’Bryan, , Bruno repeated. His mastery knew no bounds, and if any- Meyrick Jones body ever doubts this, I recommend trying to juggle US 2011, 35mm, color, 73 min half as many balls on a film set as he did, time and time again. – ARP saturday november 16 at 8:30pm Directed by Jerry Lewis. With Jerry Lewis, Sebastian Cabot, THE FAMILY JEWELS Donna Butterworth I’ve spent almost a decade grappling with the nucle- US 1965, 35mm, color, 100 min ar blast of inspiration I got from a “Late Jerry” ret- rospective at Archives in the autumn of 2009. I was zeroing in on how to crack my second film, The Color Wheel, and the overt antagonism I perceived on the part of Jerry casting himself in, for this particular film, seven different roles—as well as Jerry Lewis THE FAMILY JEWELS

FOUR FILMS BY FRANÇOIS OZON OCTOBER 19 – NOVEMBER 15 A luminary and frequently controversial figure of the French cinema since the 1990s, François Ozon (b. 1967) has continued to surprise and delight with his ever- stylish, daring and genre-defying films. Ozon first made a name for himself as an with a series of audacious and darkly exuberant works that includedSee the Sea (1998), Sitcom (1999), Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000) and (2002), energetic and intelligent films which channeled and reinvented traditions of the thriller, kitchen-sink melodrama and the musical while also paying direct homage to one of Ozon’s acknowledged idols, . During the same period, Ozon also explored a subtler, at times more melancholic mode of art cinema with now-classic films such as Under the Sand and Swimming Pool, understated psychological studies starring the enigmatic icon of disquieting art cinema, . In 2016, Ozon turned in a new direction with a lush period film,Frantz , a lyrical drama of war and forgiveness set in the aftermath of World War I. Ozon continues to be remarkably prolific and unpredictable, but perhaps never more so than with his latest film, By the Grace of God, a sobering response to the sexual abuse scandal now shaking the in France and centered on the still-ongoing trial of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, who covered up knowledge of the serial assault of young boys during his all too long tenure. Winner of the coveted Silver Bear at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival, By the Grace of God reveals yet another side of Ozon’s cinema, charged with an urgent anger and sense of injustice and dedicated to a methodical and compassionate retelling of a dark, traumatic story from the point of view of the now-adult victims. The Harvard Film Archive is thrilled to welcome François Ozon for a sneak preview screening of By the Grace of God, presented as part of our monthly Cinema of Resistance series. Accompanying the film are three earlier works offered as a showcase of the restraint, lyricism and political charge that are less acknowledged as facets of Ozon’s vital and polymath cinema. – HG Film descriptions by Haden Guest. Special thanks: Kyle Westphal—Music Box Films; Amélie Garin-Davet—Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York; Arnaud Mentré—Consul General of France in Boston. saturday october 19 at 7pm SWIMMING POOL With his archly stylish and self-conscious thriller, Ozon made clear his playful dedication to a postmodern variant of auteurist cinema by tak- ing the title, sundrenched setting and uneasy eroticism from Jacques Deray’s eponymous, now-classic 1969 film to create an uncanny almost- doppelgänger feature placed in deliberate quotes by the figure of Charlotte Rampling as a popular but frustrated British crime novelist come to France to try and write in a different vein. What Rampling encounters in her promised Provence idyll is, of course, not what she ex- pected, but instead what the knowing viewer not so secretly hoped for: a sex thriller murder mystery announced by the sudden arrival of the brooding nymphet daughter of Rampling’s publisher, who immediately sets into play a slow-motion and ambiguous rivalry with the older wom- an. As the mysterious daughter, Ozon regular injects a searching energy into the story as she gradually challenges Rampling to unleash her inhibitions, promising to reveal dark secrets of a buried crime that appeal to the writer’s cherished demons and the viewer’s darkest curiosity. Directed by François Ozon. With Charlotte Rampling, Ludivine Sagnier, Charles Dance France/UK 2003, 35mm, color, 102 min. English and French with English subtitles François Ozon SWIMMING POOL

HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 35 depicting the crimes committed in ways that ennoble, is a masterful psychological study of grief but also yet in no way soften, the still heart-wrenching suffer- an extraordinary tone poem. ing being felt to this day. Directed by François Ozon. With Charlotte Rampling, , Directed by François Ozon. With Melvil Poupaud, Denis Ménochet, Swann Arlaud France/Japan 2001, 35mm, color, 92 min. French and English with English France/Belgium 2019, DCP, color, 137 min. French with English subtitles subtitles

Also screening as part of the Cinema of Resistance friday november 15 at 9pm program, p. 31. FRANTZ Ozon’s sensitive adaptation of Maurice Rostand’s pacifist play The Man I Killed reveals the rarely ac- friday november 15 at 7pm knowledged political voice of his cinema, offering a UNDER THE SAND (SOUS LE SABLE) poignant meditation on war and regret just as Eu- Still Ozon’s finest film, Under the Sand channels the rope, and the US, were threatened by rising nativ- spirit of Virginia Woolf to enter fully into the mind- ist and nationalist urges that today feel uncannily space of a woman locked in a slow spiral of grief, familiar. Yet Ozon also injects a subtle psychosexual mourning her husband whose unexplained disap- charge and a melancholy into his retelling of the pearance she still does not believe. Charlotte Ram- story of a French WWI veteran trying to find peace pling uses the subtlest gestures to achingly capture with his actions as a soldier while hinting at a re- the ritualistic denial of death later described so pressed double identity. poignantly by Joan Didion, with a glazed far-away Directed by François Ozon. With Pierre Niney, , Ernst Stötzner look and muted anguish that her friends and family France/Germany 2017, DCP, color & b/w, 113 min. French and German François Ozon BY THE GRACE OF GOD try to ignore and, inevitably, to cure. Under the Sand with English subtitles

$12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS FRANÇOIS OZON IN PERSON monday october 21 at 7pm BY THE GRACE OF GOD (GRÂCE À DIEU) Outraged by the still-unresolved sex crimes commit- ted by prominent members of the French Catholic Church, Ozon first considered making a documen- tary before realizing he was better suited to craft a compelling multithreaded narrative that could do justice, in every sense of the term, to the point of view and life experience of long-suffering victims of sexual abuse. Telling the story of three men looking back, reluctantly but with real purpose, By the Grace of God constructs a riveting study of injustice, com- munity and faith that looks closely at the rippling ef- fects of sexual abuse upon families, loved ones and the victims themselves, who have struggled against the shame and guilt and confusion inflicted upon them during their most vulnerable years. Ozon uses all of his consummate skills to deliver a powerful in- dictment of rigid and criminally indifferent Church hierarchy while also showing admirable restraint in François Ozon FRANTZ

THE TRANSCENDENT CINEMA OF DAVID BROOKS OCTOBER 20 – OCTOBER 28

Born in 1944 in Chelsea, Massachusetts, David Brooks entered in the early 1960s, where he immersed himself in the study of philosophy and psychology, with a particular interest in psychoanalysis and the work of Freud. During this time, Brooks met critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas and immediately got involved in New York’s burgeoning independent and scene. By 1962, Mekas had personally enlisted Brooks, then only eighteen years old, to be the first Executive Director of the newly established Film-Makers’ Cooperative. He compiled the Coop’s first distribution catalog that same year. Brooks soon left Columbia to dedicate himself to making films. For an all-too-short window, he was a leading filmmaker of his era, his films screening in programs with the likes of Bruce Conner, Ron Rice and Stan Brakhage. He eventually took a film teaching position in 1968 at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Sadly, Brooks only completed six films before his tragic death in 1969, at age twenty-four. His singular films, which typically combine mesmerizing sound collages with lush imagery from his daily life, are lyrical, personal, honest and transcendent. To celebrate his life and work on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, we’re proud to host a complete retrospective and reintroduce this still under-recognized figure. – John Klacsmann, Anthology Film Archives David Brooks established himself during the 1960s as one of the most prominent lyricists of the experimental cinema. His work was eclipsed by his early death… and throughout the next decade by the cooler, more controlled sensibility of . As a consequence, his films are scarcely remembered today, which is particularly unfortunate since at least two of them—Nightspring Daystar and The Wind is Driving Him Towards the Open Sea—deserve a place as among the most important films of this period. – J.J. Murphy, Film Culture Edited and designed by Anthology Film Archives’ John Klacsmann, The Transcendent Cinema of David Brooks chapbooks will be on sale at our box office during the screenings.

36 sunday october 20 at 7pm sunday october 27 at 5pm THE WIND IS DRIVING HIM TOWARDS THE OPEN SEA In the beginning a philosopher tells of seeing his hero, DiMaggio, hit a home run. How did he know he hit a home run? He checked the newspapers. How did they know? The philosophers ask, ‘How can we prove that this is grass?’ How do we know anything? The Wind… is about those explorations one must make to find out about the world. The object of any man’s exploration must ultimately be a woman, a kumari. In the film a boy travels, while we search for a man, Chandler Moore. He is never found, but we see the world he has made for himself. When one does not find a kumari one often finds a kumiss. A film in numerous realities including those of image, news, , philosophy, documentary, . – David Brooks Directed by David Brooks. With Stanley Cavell, Arthur Danto, Sidney Morgenbesser US 1968, 16mm, color, 52 min

Preceded by REDCAP OR PEANUT BUTTER ON MY ROOF A mutual venture of a most inordinate sort. Vaguely a mistake, but fun at that. David Brooks THE WIND IS DRIVING HIM TOWARDS THE OPEN SEA – David Brooks and Ira Schneider monday october 28 at 7pm Directed by David Brooks and Ira Schneider JERRY US 1965, 16mm, color, 14 min Part I: music as image… Part II: movement of the film-maker [Jerry Jofen]. Films preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The – David Brooks Foundation for the Visual Arts. Directed by David Brooks US 1963, 16mm, b/w, silent, 3 min

NIGHTSPRING DAYSTAR Dark to light, sadness to happiness, night to day; the film springs from the night through the dawn to the daystar, following the adventures of the mind on the way. – DB Directed by David Brooks US 1964, 16mm, color, 18 min

[ROLAND KIRK] Footage of the legendary jazz musician shot and edited by Brooks but never printed until preserved by Anthology Film Archives in 2009. Directed by David Brooks US 1964, 16mm, b/w, silent, 4 min

WINTER ’64-‘66 Door golden night room trees fire drip rain blue horse river snow birds green mountain forest dark room mist car tress window ducks are flying…. Overtones: Raga Palas Kafi, Grant’s, Slug’s, Bo Diddley,

David Brooks JERRY Jimmy Reed, Raga Rageshri, the wind, Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, , Piatnitsky Chorus. Locales: Nantucket, Kazakhstan, Grant’s, Nepal, Colorado, Mt. Kearsarge, Iowa, 7th Street. – DB Directed by David Brooks US 1964-66, 16mm, color, 1000 seconds

LETTER TO D.H. IN PARIS Stoned friends/music more music/fields/movement/play/spontaneous/very beautiful. – Carolyn Brooks Directed by David Brooks US 1967, 16mm, color, 4 min

EEL CREEK Fishing/boys and father/pure/simple/straight forward – CB Directed by David Brooks US 1968, 16mm, color, 7 min

All films in the program preserved by Anthology Film Archives with support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, except Winter ’64–’66 and Nightspring Daystar preserved by Anthology Film Archives through the National Foundation’s Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film David Brooks NIGHTSPRING DAYSTAR Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation. HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 37 MAKE MY DAY. THE CINEMATIC IMAGINATION OF THE REAGAN ERA OCTOBER 31 – NOVEMBER 30

With his latest book Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan, celebrated film critic J. Hoberman brings to a close his Found Illusions trilogy, meditating on the intertwining of American cinema, politics and popular culture that defined the post-WWII era. Focused now on the broad period from George Lucas’(1973) to John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), Hoberman looks closely at the often uncanny and absurd synchronicities between Hollywood cinema and Ameri- can politics, especially during the years when the White House was occupied by former Warner Brothers contract actor Ronald Reagan. Reading across popular box- office hits, like Ghostbusters and the now iconic Rambo and films, as well as classics like Blue Velvet, Videodrome and The King of Comedy, Hoberman palpably evokes and astutely critiques the nexus of paranoia, false nostalgia and hollow nationalism that defined the Reagan era. “If the Sixties and early Seventies were, at least in part, periods of disillusionment, the late Seventies and Eighties brought a process of re-illusionment. Its agent was Ronald Reagan. His mandate wasn’t simply to restore America’s economy and sense of military superiority but also, even more crucially, its innocence. Like an old movie or TV rerun, Reagan reversed the flow of time and remade our days.” The Harvard Film Archive welcomes back J. Hoberman to introduce Being There in a visit co-presented with the Brattle Theatre, which will host a book signing with Hoberman on Tuesday November 12 and screen additional films from his book throughout November. Consult the Brattle website for details. Co-presented with the Brattle Theatre, Cambridge. Film notes adapted from Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan.

saturday november 9 at 8:30pm THE KING OF COMEDY Two downbeat fables—Cronenberg’s Videodrome and Scorsese’s The King of Comedy—perhaps pon- dering the mystery of Ronald Reagan, as well as the impending arrival of George Orwell’s dread 1984—dramatized the nature of celebrity in the context of mass-mediated reality. The King of Com- edy puts a more recognizably human face on the Media. A thirty-four-year-old messenger still living at home, Rupert Pupkin (De Niro) is a borderline psy- chotic driven to become a celebrity—crossing over from passive Media consumer to elite Media subject. Pupkin has no discernable talent other than a fero- cious, unrelenting need of recognition. Although he has never performed for an audience, he has stud- Hal Ashby BEING THERE ied obsessively to be a guest, planning INTRODUCTION BY J. HOBERMAN to start his career on a TV program watched each monday november 11 at 7pm night by half of America. BEING THERE Directed by . With , Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott No less enigmatic than the simpleton Chance played US 1983, 35mm, color, 109 min by Peter Sellers is the logic—or lack of same—that

James Cameron ALIENS thursday october 31 at 9pm ALIENS Recruited to make a sequel to Alien, James Cam- eron reworked the original as a genre mash-up—a horror sci-fi war movie that was also a last-stand crypto-Western and a drama of maternal love— multiplying the monsters while maintaining the origi- nal’s anti-corporate attitude. ’s Ripley is dispatched, along with a squad of Ma- rines, on behalf of “the Company” to investigate the disappearance of settlers on the alien planet. The Company has no difficulty writing off humans’ lives in the service of profit, while Ripley is innately nur- turing. Motherhood is at once macho and monstrous and, in her all but single-handed conquest, Ripley can lay claim to be the greatest Reagan-era hard body of all. Directed by . With Sigourney Weaver, Michael Biehn, Carrie Henn US 1986, 35mm, color, 137 min Martin Scorsese THE KING OF COMEDY 38 David Lynch BLUE VELVET caused this wildly inappropriate movie to be se- melodramas. Lynch both celebrates and defamiliar- critic for the mainline Protestant journal Christian lected as Reagan’s first post-recovery movie in the izes a comfortable, picture postcard façade of malt Century declared it the best film of 1986, “probing White House screening room after surviving Hinck- shoppes, football fields and rec-room basements— the depths of evil.” Writing in the , ley’s attempted assassination. Was it because Be- as well as Roy Orbison, whose morose ballad “In John Simon called Lynch “a naïf from Montana who ing There satirized Washington society and politics? Dreams” is lip-synched by the androgynous propri- wants to be deep, but whose depth consists of draw- Was it because Reagan’s peer — etor of a shabby brothel (Dean Stockwell). Given its ing huge sexual organs on Norman Rockwell paint- something of a political ally during the long-ago originality, Blue Velvet received a mixed response. ings.” 1940s—won an Oscar for best supporting actor? The movie was rejected as “pornographic” by the Directed by David Lynch. With Kyle MacLachlan, , Being There is filled with things that Reagan might even though it was produced by Dennis Hopper well have found disturbing. Still, the movie made Italian mogul and starred native US 1986, 35mm, color, 120 min something of an impression. In February 1983, at daughter Isabella Rossellini. On the other hand, the the start of Reagan’s third year in office, a letter to the business editor of pointed out a statement by the president that was clearly inspired by Sellers' character. Directed by Hal Ashby. With Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Warden US 1979, 35mm, color, 120 min saturday november 30 at 7pm BACK TO THE FUTURE In dealing with the buried past, both Blue Velvet and Demme’s Something Wild (1986) address Back to the Future, the movie that most obviously superimposed the Fifties over the Eighties. Unfolding beneath the banner “Spirit of ’76,” the ten-year high school class reunion in Something Wild is a version of Back to the Future’s aptly named “Under the Sea” dance—rich with instances of voyeurism, exhibitionism and sexual assault—as Marty’s father spies on Marty’s mother undressing, Marty performs on stage, and Biff at- tempts to rape Marty’s mother, who has already ex- pressed her interest in Marty. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. With Michael J. Fox, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson US 1985, 35mm, color, 116 min saturday november 30 at 9:15pm BLUE VELVET Ostensibly set in the present, Blue Velvet evokes the Fifties and, even more than the actual era, its florid Robert Zemeckis BACK TO THE FUTURE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE september - november 2019 39 First Class Mail harvard film archive U.S. Postage Paid carpenter center for the visual arts Boston, MA 24 quincy street cambridge, ma 02138 Permit No. 1636

MATI DIOP’S ATLANTIQUE NOVEMBER 18 in person

SOFIA BOHDANOWICZ & DERAGH CAMPBELL sept 16 GODFREY REGGIO sept 21 - 22 MARGARET HONDA sept 27 DIEUDO HAMADI oct 4 - 5 PEDRO COSTA oct 7 FRANÇOIS OZON oct 21 ALEX ROSS PERRY nov 2 - 4 J. HOBERMAN nov 11 MATI DIOP nov 18 Mati Diop ATLANTIQUE

The stunning debut feature by actress-turned-filmmaker Mati Diop is a bewitching tale of longing focused on a young Senegalese woman gripped by her forbidden love for an exploited construction worker who abruptly emigrates to Europe but seems to be lingering mysteriously behind. Melding with a clear-eyed coming soon vision of the migrant crisis, Atlantique—which began, in fact, as a documentary short—gives unique resonance to an urgent issue reshaping communities across Europe and Africa today. A surprise but well-deserved winner of the DUET FOR CANNIBALS BY coveted Grand Prix at the 2019 , Atlantique establishes Diop as a central figure in a new wave SUSAN SONTAG of politically charged yet lyrically shaped art cinema that is reorienting contemporary filmmaking towards bold PATRICIO GUZMÁN'S new directions. – HG CHILEAN TRILOGY The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to partner with the Film Study Center to welcome back former Radcliffe-FSC LA NOUVELLE VAGUE, Fellow Mati Diop for an area premiere of her remarkable new film. AUTREMENT Special thanks: Amélie Garin-Davet—Cultural Services of the French Embassy; Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Julie Mallozzi— TESTUYA MARIKO IN PERSON Film Study Center, Harvard. ¡RUMBERAS! Co-sponsored by the Film Study Center, Harvard. THE FILMS OF RICHARD SERRA $12 SPECIAL EVENT TICKETS ANGELA SCHANELEC IN PERSON MATI DIOP IN PERSON monday november 18 at 7pm SILENT HITCHCOCK ATLANTIQUE TRIBUTE TO STEVE LIVERNASH Directed by Mati Diop. With Mame Sane, Amadou Mbow, Traoré Belgium/France/Senegal 2019, DCP, color, 105 min. French and Wolof with English subtitles 40